Um, OK, So, What’s the Point?

The first Android devices shipped to the public in October 2008. Public Android app development had been going on for about a year prior to this, with the first preview releases and Android SDK bits available in 2007. Google had been working on Android apps for a while prior even to that preview release.

In short, Android app development has been around for a while.

Along the way, many techniques and approaches were tried and discarded. Many programming patterns were applied, rejected, and replaced. Many UI designs were rolled out to great fanfare, only to be shunted aside in favor of yet new UI designs. And so on. Android app development has a lot of history, and while some of that history remains relevant today, a lot of it is just baggage.

Jetpack is a way of thinking about Android app development that dumps some of that baggage.

The focus of Jetpack — and this book by extension — is on the current recommended practices in Android. We try to ignore most of the history, or at least put it in its appropriate place. Instead, we try to help you build using up-to-date approaches, bypassing the approaches of yesteryear.