Android Jetpack Components

Android Jetpack is a suite of libraries, tools, and guidance to help developers write high-quality apps easier. These components help developers to follow best practices, offering backward compatibility and updates, so you always have access to the latest and greatest versions of the Jetpack components.

Why should you use Android Jetpack?

Android Jetpack is built around modern design practices like separation of concerns and testability as well as productivity features like Kotlin integration. While the components of Android Jetpack help in following the best practices and writing the boilerplate code, you can integrate the parts of Android Jetpack that solve your problems while keeping the parts of your app that are already working. This makes it far easier for you to build robust, high quality apps with less code. 

Android Jetpack Components

Android Jetpack components are a collection of libraries that are individually adoptable and built to work together while taking advantage of Kotlin language features that make us more productive. We can classify these software components in 4 categories:

1.Foundation Components

The foundation components provide us backward compatibility, testing features & Kotlin language support. Let’s have a look at some featured foundation libraries:

• App Compat: degrade on older versions of Android with material design user interface implementation support.
• Android KTX: set of Kotlin extensions to write more concise, idiomatic Kotlin code.
• Multidex: enable support for multiple dex files for apps.
• Test: test framework for unit and runtime UI tests in Android.

2.Architecture Components

The architecture components help us building robust apps, testable apps & maintanaible apps. Let’s have a look at some featured architecture libraries:

• Data Binding: bind UI elements in your layout to data sources of your app.
• Lifecycles: manage activity and fragment lifecycles of your app.
• LiveData: notify views of any database changes.
• Navigation: handle everything needed for in-app navigation.
• Paging: gradually load information on demand from your data source.
• Room: provide an abstraction layer over SQLite to allow database access.
• ViewModel: store and manage UI-related data in a lifecycle conscious way.
• WorkManager: schedule deferrable, asynchronous tasks that are expected to run even if the app exits or device restarts.

3.Behavior Components

The behavior components help us integrate Android services like notifications, permissions, preferences & schedules . Let’s have a look at some featured behavior libraries:

• Download Manager: schedule and manage large downloads in background with auto retry support.
• Media & playback: backwards compatible APIs for media playback and routing.
• Notifications: provide a backwards-compatible notification API with Wear and Auto support.
• Permissions: protect the privacy of your app user. 
• Preferences: create interactive settings screens for users to configure.

4.UI Components

The UI components provide widgets to help us out with app building in terms of usability. Let’s have a look at some featured UI libraries:

• Animation and transitions: move widgets and transition between screens.
• Fragments: a basic unit of composable UI.
• Layouts: lay out widgets with different algorithms.
• Palette: pull useful information from color palettes.
• TV: let users experience your app’s immersive content on the big screen.
• Wear: build components to develop Wear apps.

Interested in Android Development? Check out our Android Architecture course if you want to learn how to apply best practices to create a solid and scalable Android Architecture apps.