android ui design app source code

Android UI,Layout & Material Design Tutorial, Examples And Code

Android UI designing can be done either in XML or programmatically in application. But the Android UI designer mostly prefer XML for defining UI because it separate the presentation from the code and makes easier to visualize, manage, edit and debug the App.

Here our in depth tutorial will teach you Android UI designing step by step starting with XML basic, layout, widgets and attributes with examples. Following it you will learn different UI Design techniques, patterns & principles and finally we will show you lots of examples where we will discuss designing of different Apps from scratch to finish.

Prerequisites For Designing Android UI:

Android Studio And SDK:

Android Studio is the official IDE for developing Android App created by Google. It has a very simple layout editor which support drag and drop for designing UI where one can drag layout, widgets, text fields etc. and drop it on the Virtual mobile screen to design Android UI. It also has the properties option where one can easily fill attribute like color, text etc to give attractive and pretty look to UI. The Studio also has Text option where one can see the XML code of the UI and edit it.

If you are new to it then check our Android Studio guide.

Android Designing Tutorial:

New to Android UI? Begin from here.

XML In Android

First understand basics of XML In Android

Layout in Android:

Layout – Layout are used to define the actual UI(User interface) of our application. It holds all the elements (i.e. views) or the tools that we want to use in our application. For example, TextView, Button and other UI elements.

Types Of Layout And Few Important ViewGroup In Android

Constraint Layout
Linear Layout
Relative Layout
Table Layout
FrameLayout
Absolute Layout
ListView
GridView

Also Read: Nesting Of Layout in Android

Adapter In Android (Very Important To Learn)

Adapter – Adapter acts as a bridge between UI component and data source that helps us to fill data in UI component. It holds the data and send the data to an Adapter view then view can takes the data from the adapter view and shows the data on different views like as ListView, GridView, Spinner etc.

Different types of Adapter in Android:

BaseAdapter
SimpleAdapter
Custom SimpleAdapter
ArrayAdapter
BaseAdapter

Important Android UI Tutorials

List of all miscellaneous Android UI tutorials

Android UI Tutorial
Topics (Follow the link to read tutorial)	Description
ListView	It helps in displaying the data in the form of a scrollable list.
GridView	It display items in two dimensional scrolling grid (rows and columns), the grid items are not necessarily predetermined but they are automatically inserted to the layout using a ListAdapter.
ScrollView And Horizontal	It is used to scroll the items in vertical direction and Horizontal ScrollView scroll the items in horizontal direction
Spinner	Spinner provides a quick way to select one value from a set of values. Android spinners are nothing but the drop down-list seen in other programming languages.
Custom Spinner	When we want to display a spinner item with image, text etc
TextView	It display text to the user
EditText	It provide an input or text field where user can enter something like his name details, phone number etc
Button	It is a push button which can be clicked, or pressed by the user to perform an action
ImageView	It is used to display an image file in application
ImageButton	It is used to display a normal button with a custom image in a button
CheckBox	It is a type of two state button either unchecked or checked in Android. We can use it in to take survey in Android app where we will list few options and allow user to choose using CheckBox.
Switch	It is off/on button which indicate the current state of Switch. It is commonly used in selecting on/off in Sound, Bluetooth, WiFi etc.
RadioButton And RadioGroup	In Android, RadioButton are mainly used together in a RadioGroup. In RadioGroup checking the one radiobutton out of several radio button added in it will automatically unchecked all the others.
RatingBar	It is used to get the rating from the app user.
WebView	It is a view which is used to display the web pages in application.
AutoCompleteTextView	It is a view i.e similar to EditText, except that it displays a list of completion suggestions automatically while the user is typing.
MultiAutoCompleteTextView	MultiAutoCompleteTextView is similar to AutoCompleteTextView except that it can hold multiple string words value at single time
ProgressBar	It is used to display the status of work being done like analyzing status of work or downloading a file etc.
Timepicker	It is a widget used for selecting the time of the day in either AM/PM mode or 24 hours mode
DatePicker	It is a widget used to select a date by day, month and year
Calendar View	It is used for displaying Calendar and selecting dates
AnalogClock, DigitalClock And TextClock	AnalogClock is a two handed clock one for hour indicator and the other for minute indicator and DigitalClock & TextClock both looks like your normal digital watch on hand which displays the hours minutes and seconds in digital format
SeekBar	It is an extension of ProgressBar that adds a draggable thumb, a user can touch the thumb and drag left or right to set the value for current progress
ExpandableListView	It is a View that shows items in a vertically scrolling two level list
Chronometer	It implements a simple timer
ZoomControls	It display simple set of controls that is used for zooming and provides callback to register for events
CheckedTextView	It is an extension of normal TextView that supports the checkable interface and displays it
VideoView	It is used to display a video file
TabHost	It is a Container for tabbed window view. Whenever we need to enter or display a lot of information in one activity. A simple and effective method is to use tabs in your interface form which is done using TabHost in Android.
SearchView	It provide search user interface where users can enter a search query and then submit a request to search provider
SlidingDrawer	It is used to hide the content out of the screen and allows the user to drag a handle to bring the content on screen
TextSwitcher	It is used to animate a label(i.e. text) on screen
ViewSwitcher	It is used for switching between views which can hold only two child views for switching
ViewFlipper	ViewSwitcher can hold only two child views but ViewFlipper can holds two or more child views and show one at a time
ViewStub	It is a zero sized invisible View that can be used to lazily inflate layout resource at runtime
Gallery	It is a view used to show items in a center locked, horizontally scrolling list and user will select a view and then user selected view will be shown in the center of the Horizontal list
CountDownTimer	CountDownTimer in Android is used to set a countdown based on interval set by you and it will stop when the time has come in future.
Alert Dialog	Alert Dialog in an android UI prompts a small window to make decision on mobile screen. Sometimes before making a decision it is required to give an alert to the user without moving to next activity.
ProgressDialog	Android Progress Dialog is a UI which shows the progress of a task like you want user to wait until the previous lined up task is completed and for that purpose you can use progress dialog.
HTML in Android	In Android, many times while designing an application we might be in a situation where we would like to use HTML content and display in our App screen. It may be to display some static content like help, support, FAQ and others pages.

What's Next Tutorial To Learn:

Learn Android Material Design
Advance Android Programming Tutorial
Tutorial To Create Android App In Android Studio [Step by Step]