Summary

We have covered quite a lot, considering that this is an introductory chapter. We've built examples of two of the best known and most useful design patterns and hopefully seen why they might be of use to us.

We began by looking at what patterns are and why we might use them in an Android setting. This was helped by taking a look at the development tools at our disposal, and how and why we can and should target specific platform versions and form factors.

We then applied this knowledge to create two very simple apps that employed basic factory patterns and saw how we can test and then retrieve data from an app running on any device, be it real or virtual.

This puts us in a great situation to take a look at other patterns and consider which to use when building a fully working app. This is something we will look at more closely in the next chapter, where we will introduce the builder pattern and how Android layouts are produced.