Chapter 11: Creating Infinite Lists with Jetpack Paging and Kotlin Flow

In the previous chapters, we built the great Restaurants App that displayed content from our own backend. However, the number of restaurants displayed in the Restaurants App was fixed, and the user was only able to browse through the few restaurants that we added to our Firebase database.

In this chapter, we will understand how pagination can help us display large datasets of items without putting pressure on our backend and without huge network bandwidth consumption. We will create the impression of an infinite list of items inside a new app that we will be working on called the Repositories App, and we will achieve that with the help of yet another Jetpack library called Paging.

In the first section, Why do we need pagination?, we will explore what data pagination is and how it can help us break large datasets into pages of data, thereby optimizing the communication between our app and the backend server...