Android Jetpack
In the recent past, global tech companies like Google have focused on delivering innovative products to meet the specific needs of the Developers Community. Android Jetpack is one of the latest suite of libraries for developers from Google. As a developer, your Android development can benefit from Jetpack components, tools, and guidance. It can support developers throughout the Android application development life-cycle. With Jetpack components, you can write high-quality apps quickly and speed up your development process.
Jetpack Components
Jetpack components can streamline the development process by managing both mundane and mission-critical tasks like navigation, paging, and background tasks. It is updated regularly with the latest components but also supports older versions of the Android OS. The five latest Jetpack components include WorkManager, Navigation, Paging, Slices, and Android KTX. These five new Jetpack components wrap the existing Android support libraries and components. From life-cycle management to foundation features, layout controls, and UI features, Jetpack components are robust enough to manage both simple and complex tasks in Android development.
Leveraging Jetpack Components in Android Development
Jetpack allows you to streamline your development process by exploiting the best of the latest and the existing components. Each of the five new components is designed to streamline specific tasks, but all come in handy throughout the development lifecycle.
WorkManager
Jetpack’s WorkManager is a library for scheduling and managing background tasks. It allows developers to enqueue work, observe work status, and create chains of workers. This component is designed around two work attributes — deferrable and guaranteed. Deferrable work doesn’t have to happen straight away and will be executed once specific constraints are met. Some tasks are guaranteed to run regardless of whether constraints have been met. Constraints, inputs, and backoff criteria can be accepted by WorkerRequest. WorkManager operations run on a backward thread by default and support OnTimeWorkRequest and PeriodicWorkRequest.
Navigation
For easy management of your navigation back stack, you can use the Navigation API. It reduces the boilerplate of your apps and simplifies deeplinking and the implementation of navigation in apps. Developers no longer need a Fragment transaction. Navigation Editor is one of its features and allows developers to modify their navigation graphs as they wish. This highly flexible editor, coupled with all the other capabilities offered by Navigation API, is enough to streamline and speed up your Android development.
Paging
The Paging API makes it easier to manage data in pages when combined with RecyclerView. It requests data automatically when the user scrolls down the page, which allows Android developers to add infinite scrolling to their apps. The ability to pull data in quick succession returns feedback to the user within a short time. This component offers a wide range of benefits, including quick response to user input, even when data is being updated or refreshed. As a developer, Paging API offers you an alternative that does exhaust network bandwidth and system resources. It consumes fewer system resources and needs minimal network bandwidth.
Slices
The Slices API is highly interactive and allows Android developers to surface their application’s user interface (UI) as a search result inside the Google App. Apart from being interactive, the Slices API is templated, updatable, and backward-compatible. All the benefits offered by this Jetpack component can reduce the workload and speed up Android development.
Android KTX
This Jetpack component is a set of Kotlin Extensions that optimizes Android platform APIs for Kotlin. Android developers can benefit from concise and pleasant development with Kotlin. It takes care of repetitive coding and eliminates the need to rewrite codes again and again for the same functionality. Unlike most other extensions, you use Android KTX for your development without having to worry about messing up existing Android APIs because it doesn’t add new features.
Bottom Line
From WorkManager to Navigation, Paging, Slices, and Android KTX, Jetpack components are robust enough to speed up Android development. They are designed to reduce the workload and streamline the process by automating some tasks. Developers should use Jetpack components to speed up their development process.