Chapter 1 Initialize the Penny Drop App

Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack — by Michael Fazio (12 / 125)

👈 Part 1 Penny Drop | TOC | How to Play Penny Drop 👉

Here we are! It’s time to build our first app, a game called Penny Drop. If you’re new to Android development, don’t worry, this chapter covers how to get started with building Android apps in Android Studio using the Kotlin programming language and the Android Jetpack libraries. We’ll go through the steps to generate an app from scratch (with an overview of what is generated for us), then create a couple of mostly empty views, and set up the app to navigate between them.

If you’ve created an Android app before, Penny Drop will be a useful introduction to Jetpack and/or Kotlin. You’ll learn, in particular, the Navigation component, how to use a ViewModel with Fragment classes, and database access with Room. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, this chapter is focused on generating an app skeleton in Android Studio, creating two Fragment classes, and using the Navigation component in conjunction with a bottom navigation bar.

But if you’re comfortable with all of that, take a look at the rules of Penny Drop in the next section, then just meet up with us again at ​Summary and Next Steps​.

👈 Part 1 Penny Drop | TOC | How to Play Penny Drop 👉

Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack by Michael Fazio can be purchased in other book formats directly from the Pragmatic Programmers. If you notice a code error or formatting mistake, please let us know here so that we can fix it.