Your Second Kotlin Android App

Jetpack Libraries is a collection of development tools, APIs, language & distribution technologies recommended by the Android team at Google to help developers be productive and create better apps that run across billions of devices.

Before Jetpack libraries were introduced, Android developers faced some common pain points. These included:

• Storing data in a local database and being able to observe changes to the data.
• Navigating between screens in an app.
• Handling lifecycle in activities and fragments.
• Loading infinite lists.
• Handling background jobs.

This is just to mention a few of these pain points. To solve some of these problems, developers had to write a lot of boilerplate code. This was time-consuming and error-prone. The Android community at large had solutions to these as well. Jetpack libraries were created to solve these problems concisely and efficiently.

For each of the pain points mentioned above, Jetpack libraries have been created to solve them. These include:

• Room - A library to store data locally in a database.
• Navigation - A library to navigate between screens in an app.
• Lifecycle - A library to handle lifecycle in activities and fragments.
• Paging - A library to load infinite lists.
• WorkManager - A library to handle background jobs.

You might be asking yourself, why should I use Jetpack libraries? Well, there are several reasons why you should use Jetpack libraries:

• Follow the best practices recommended by the Google team.
• Jetpack libraries eliminate the need to write boilerplate code.
• Reduce fragmentation. The libraries offer backward compatibility with older android devices. This means you don’t have to write a lot of code to support older devices. This helps reduce the fragmentation issue that has been a problem for android developers.
• The APIs work well together to help you accelerate the development process.

There are tons of Jetpack Libraries and you can check the available ones at https://developer.android.com/jetpack/. In this course, you’ve already used the ViewModel which is part of the Jetpack Libraries. In the next episode, you’ll use the Navigation library.