Developing applications for the Android mobile operating system can seem daunting, particularly if it requires learning a new programming language: Kotlin, now Android’s official development language. With this practical book, Android developers will learn how to make the transition from Java to Kotlin, including how Kotlin provides a true advantage for gaining control over asynchronous computations.

Authors Pierre-Olivier Laurence, Amanda Hinchman-Dominguez, G. Blake Meike, and Mike Dunn explore implementations of the most common tasks in native Android development, and show you how Kotlin can help you solve concurrency problems. With a focus on structured concurrency, a new asynchronous programming paradigm, this book will guide you through one of Kotlin’s most powerful constructs, coroutines.

Learn about Kotlin essentials and the Kotlin Collections Framework
Explore Android fundamentals: the operating system and the application container and its components
Learn about thread safety and how to handle concurrency
Write sequential, asynchronous work at a low cost
Examine structured concurrency with coroutines, and learn how channels make coroutines communicate
Learn how to use flows for asynchronous data processing
Understand performance considerations using Android profiling tools
Use performance optimizations to trim resource consumption