Android is one of the most popular Operating Systems in the world of mobile phones. It has about 2.5 billion active users spanning over 190 countries. Through this blog, I’ve tried my best to give you an idea of how an android application works on your phone. Let’s dive in!
What’s an Android Application?
Most of us use smartphones, right? Also, you might have been using apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. Each app has some functionality associated with it. For example, billions of people use WhatsApp to send messages, audio chats, multimedia files, etc. with the help of an internet connection and a valid phone number. Similarly, Instagram is a social networking application for sharing photos and videos.
So, deep under the hood, an Android Application is just like software on a computer that does some function. They are built to make our lives easier. In conclusion, Android apps are software that is built to run on the Android Operating System (Mobile OS)!
The Activity of an App
The Activity class is a crucial component of an Android app, and the way activities are launched and put together is a fundamental part of the platform’s application model. Unlike programming paradigms in which apps are launched with a main() method, the Android system initiates code in an Activity instance by invoking specific callback methods that correspond to specific stages of its lifecycle.
So, in short, Activity is like an open canvas where the app draws its UI(User Interface).
Views
As we have seen earlier, the buttons, cards, checkboxes, app bars, etc. are the visible components of an application. Also, we could place images, videos as well as texts in the activity.
There are also components that are embedded within an app that no one can see. So all these parts are known as Views in an Android Application.
They are also called Widgets in mobile development frameworks like Flutter.
Overview
When you press on the icon of an app, a message is sent from the Operating System and this is usually represented by the OnCreate() function in java or Kotlin (F.Y.I: Java and Kotlin are languages used to build native Android applications).
Let’s take a simple example, You wanted to update your status on your WhatsApp account. When you do the necessary steps, the message is sent to a cloud database and gets stored. All information is encrypted with requisite security layers, so let’s keep that topic for discussion later.
The data is then parsed to your friend’s WhatsApp account and they get an alert or update on their device.
Similarly, the status updates of your contacts are parsed through cloud databases and communicate with your application.
These operations make up the Activity Life Cycle.
Key Takeaways
An Android application is event-driven. When some event, say a button click or something happens, it responds to it, fetches the data, and displays it. It is very generic in nature. Most of the time, the app might be in an idle state!
We have complex applications that make use of cutting-edge technologies like AR/VR, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and so on to simple apps like calculators, weather apps et cetera.
As a wrap, Mobile application development is a growing field of computer science that helps you create mobile solutions to the problems of humans.
Enjoyed reading this story? Here is an interesting article from our side:
https://medium.com/paperkin/mahsaamini-25a781c18cc6
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