Android Sunflower

A gardening app illustrating Android development best practices with Android Jetpack.

Android Sunflower is currently under heavy development. Note that some changes (such as database schema modifications) are not backwards compatible and may cause the app to crash. In this case, please uninstall and re-install the app.

Introduction

Android Jetpack is a set of components, tools and guidance to make great Android apps. They bring together the existing Support Library and Architecture Components and arrange them into four categories:

Android Jetpack

Android Sunflower demonstrates utilizing these components to create a simple gardening app. Read the Introducing Android Sunflower article for a walkthrough of the app.

Getting Started

This project uses the Gradle build system. To build this project, use the gradlew build command or use “Import Project” in Android Studio.

There are two Gradle tasks for testing the project:

  • connectedAndroidTest – for running Espresso on a connected device
  • test – for running unit tests

For more resources on learning Android development, visit the Developer Guides at developer.android.com.

Unsplash API key

Sunflower uses the Unsplash API to load pictures on the gallery screen. To use the API, you will need to obtain a free developer API key. See the Unsplash API Documentation for instructions.

Once you have the key, add this line to the gradle.properties file, either in your user home directory (usually ~/.gradle/gradle.properties on Linux and Mac) or in the project’s root folder:

unsplash_access_key=<your Unsplash access key>

The app is still usable without an API key, though you won’t be able to navigate to the gallery screen.

Screenshots

List of plants Plant details My Garden

Libraries Used

  • Foundation – Components for core system capabilities, Kotlin extensions and support for multidex and automated testing.

    • AppCompat – Degrade gracefully on older versions of Android.
    • Android KTX – Write more concise, idiomatic Kotlin code.
    • Test – An Android testing framework for unit and runtime UI tests.
  • Architecture – A collection of libraries that help you design robust, testable, and maintainable apps. Start with classes for managing your UI component lifecycle and handling data persistence.

    • Data Binding – Declaratively bind observable data to UI elements.
    • Lifecycles – Create a UI that automatically responds to lifecycle events.
    • LiveData – Build data objects that notify views when the underlying database changes.
    • Navigation – Handle everything needed for in-app navigation.
    • Room – Access your app’s SQLite database with in-app objects and compile-time checks.
    • ViewModel – Store UI-related data that isn’t destroyed on app rotations. Easily schedule asynchronous tasks for optimal execution.
    • WorkManager – Manage your Android background jobs.
  • UI – Details on why and how to use UI Components in your apps – together or separate
  • Third party and miscellaneous libraries

Upcoming features

Updates will include incorporating additional Jetpack components and updating existing components as the component libraries evolve.

Interested in seeing a particular feature of the Android Framework or Jetpack implemented in this app? Please open a new issue.

Android Studio IDE setup

For development, the latest version of Android Studio is required. The latest version can be downloaded from here.

Sunflower uses ktlint to enforce Kotlin coding styles. Here’s how to configure it for use with Android Studio (instructions adapted from the ktlint README):

Additional resources

Check out these Wiki pages to learn more about Android Sunflower:

Non-Goals

The focus of this project is on Android Jetpack and the Android framework. Thus, there are no immediate plans to implement features outside of this scope.

Support

If you’ve found an error in this sample, please file an issue: https://github.com/android/sunflower/issues

Patches are encouraged, and may be submitted by forking this project and submitting a pull request through GitHub.

Third Party Content

Select text used for describing the plants (in plants.json) are used from Wikipedia via CC BY-SA 3.0 US (license in ASSETS_LICENSE).

seed” by Aisyah is licensed under CC BY 3.0

License

Copyright 2018 Google, Inc.

Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

GitHub

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