Book excerpt: This book with 93 lessons in 3 PARTs will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about your Android smartphone or tablet in an equally friendly manner.Because that's the best way to learn how to get the most from your Android. From buying, unpacking, and setting up your gizmo to managing calls and email, posting to social media, navigating with Maps, and creating a photo slideshow, it's like having a good friend show you the basics and explain how to take advantage of all the cool stuff.Beginning with the basics, this book provides an outline of the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment. An overview of Android Studio has included covering areas such as tool windows, the code editor and the Layout Editor tool. An introduction to the architecture of Android is followed by an in-depth look at the design of Android applications and user interfaces using the Android Studio environment.Chapters are also included covering the Android Architecture Components including view models, lifecycle management, Room database access, the Database Inspector, app navigation, live data and data binding.More advanced topics such as intents are also covered, as are touch screen handling, gesture recognition, and the recording and playback of audio. This edition of the book also covers printing, transitions, cloud-based file storage and foldable device support.The concepts of material design are also covered in detail, including the use of floating action buttons, Snackbars, tabbed interfaces, card views, navigation drawers and collapsing toolbars.Other key features of Android Studio 4.1 and Android are also covered in detail including the Layout Editor, the ConstraintLayout and ConstraintSet classes, MotionLayout Editor, view binding, constraint chains, barriers and direct reply notifications.