Building Blocks Of Android : Latest Technology For Mobile

Android Mobile Platform consists of four things Activity,Intent Receiver,Service,Content Provider.

The whole application development in this mobile platform revolves around these four building blocks. If you want to master this mobile platform, you have to be very clear about these four things. What is the idea behind these building blocks, what do they do and how do they fit and work together in an application developed on this mobile platform.

Activity is first and foremost of all the aforesaid four components in the Android mobile platform. Simply put, Activity represents a screen which can be used to carry out an activity. For example , suppose you want to play a song on your mobile device. What do you do? First you go to a screen that lists the songs from which you can choose the song. Second there will be anew screen which consists of an UI for playing songs. So there are two Activities.

Intent is how you tell the application what to do. Like view, pick, cancel etc. Intent receiver is the component through which an mobile application developed on Android mobile platform reacts to the outer stimulus like call receiving, message receiving.

Service is basically a process which may run in back ground and require no UI. For example one you start the music player , you do not require its interface. The music simply runs in back ground and you surf the web.

Content Provider is responsible for the content that appears in your application while executing like data from a database or other information from web.

Thus you see, Android mobile platform is quite straightforward and very simple in structure.