Your Second Kotlin Android App

Every new Android app starts with a brand-new project. This project is a collection of programming code, XML files and build scripts that are converted into an Android app.

When you build your project, the compiler first compiles your code and resources and then packages them into a single AAB file. It is this AAB file that you deliver to the play store for distribution.

If you’ve gone through the Android learning path, you’ve already walked through the process of creating a project, but there are important things to keep in mind that will affect your project.

In this course, you’ll be building your second Android app, so let’s take a look at some of the other options.

You’ll get started with creating your app like you get started creating all your android apps. That is, opening Android Studio.

Right away, you’re greeted with the android welcome screen. If Android Studio opens an existing project, just click File and then Close Project. The welcome screen is a good place to start a new project but there are other options as well.

First, you’ll notice it lists all the projects that you’ve opened. It also has other quick actions at the top right like:

• New Project - you use this to create new Android Studio projects.
• Open - you use this to open existing android studio projects in your working directories.
• Get from VCS - Version Control (VCS) is a way in which you save your source control. That way, you can track your changes, merge changes from other developers, or simply revert your app to an earlier state.
• Settings options with more options like Profile or Debug your APK, Import Project, Import and Android an Code Sample, SDK Manager and Virtual Device Manager.

Click the Get from VCS, you’ll notice there are a variety of version control systems to choose from. Here at kodeco.com, we use git for everything. To learn more about Git, check out our video course on it.

Cancel the window and go back to the welcome screen. On the left side, you see the Android Studio version at the top and below it several tabs like Projects, which opens by default. The other is Customize where you can quickly customize your Android Studio appearance.

There’s also the plugins section where you can add or view your installed plugins. Lastly, you have the Learn Android Studio tab where you can see several useful information about Android Studio.

Create New Project

You’ll now proceed to create your project. Start by clicking New Project. You’ll see a Templates screens. There are different form factors in Android namely:

• Phone and Tablets - for apps meant for Android Devices.
• Wear OS - for apps meant for watches.
• Android TV - for apps meant for TV that run on Android OS.
• Automotive - for apps meant for Android Auto.

For now, you’ll use the Phone and Tablets options. The templates help you quickly get started on some of the common android functionalities for example you’ll see the Bottom Navigation Activity which creates an activity with bottom tabs already set up for you and you only refactor small bits to match your app requirements.

For this course choose Empty Activity and click Next. You’ll see a configuration screen to customize your app details.

On the name field, give it the name: Listmaker. You’ll notice that the package name changes to add the app name. For the package, I’m using com.kodeco.android. If you were creating your app, you would use your reverse domain name. For now, feel free to use the com.kodeco.android package name to follow along.

I’m going to set the Save Location to my AndroidStudioProjects directory.

Last, set the Minimum SDK to API 21: Android 5.0 (Lollipop) from the drop-down list. You’ll see a tooltip showing the percentage of devices you will run on.

Click Finish and Android Studio creates your project for you.