In our recently completed series of Modern Android Development (MAD Skills) videos and articles, we focused on Kotlin and Jetpack. We’ve covered different ways to make Android code more expressive, cleaner, safer, and easier to run asynchronous code with Kotlin.

You can watch the six videos below to improve your knowledge of Kotlin and Jetpack. Each episode covers a specific set of apis, showing both how to use the API and how it works. Each video is accompanied by a blog post, most of which links to an example or Codelab to make it easier for you to understand and delve into the content, and the final episode features a FAQ from the engineers at Jetpack and Kotlin.

The KTX library is preferred

In this video, we explore how to make Coding for Android and Jetpack easy, fun, and Kotlin comfortable with the Jetpack KTX extension. Currently, more than 20 libraries have KTX versions. This episode covers some of the most important libraries: Core-ktx, which provides the usual Kotlin functionality for apis from the Android platform, and Jetpack KTX libraries that give us a better user experience with apis like LiveData and ViewModel.

You can watch the video or read the previous article.

Simplify the API with coroutines and flows

This video shows you how to use coroutines and Flow to simplify the API, and how to use suspendCancellableCoroutine callbackFlow API and build your own adapter. To get your hands dirty with this topic, see the Codelab English tutorial.

You can watch the video or read previous tweets.

Get started using the Room Kotlin API

This video opens the door to Room and shows you how to create Room tables and databases in Kotlin, and how to use Flow for one-time suspend operations such as inserts and observable queries. With coroutines and Flow, Room moves all database operations to the background thread for you. You can watch the video or read the previous article to learn how to implement and test Room queries. For more information about the practice, please refer to the Codelab English tutorial.

Use the WorkManager Kotlin API

This video makes your job easier with WorkManager. Asynchronous tasks can be successfully scheduled for immediate or delayed execution even if the application is shut down or the device is restarted. In this episode, we’ll cover the basics of WorkManager and delve into Kotlin apis such as CoroutineWorker.

You can watch the video or read the previous article, but hands-on coding is more productive, see the Codelab English tutorial.

Community to share

In this video, GDE of Magda Miu – Android shares her experience using the basic Kotlin API with CameraX. You can watch the video here.

The question and answer

The last video is a live Q&A moderated by Chet Haase with Yigit Boyar, Head of Architectural Components Technology, David Winer, Product Manager at Kotlin, Manuel Vivo, developer relations Engineer, and myself. We answered your questions on YouTube, Twitter and elsewhere. You can watch the video here.