Summary

In this chapter, we learned how mobile apps communicate with remote web APIs using HTTP connections and REST APIs. Then, we created a database for our Restaurants application with the help of Firebase and populated it with content.

After that, we explored what Retrofit is and how it abstracts the complexity associated with handling network requests and responses within HTTP connections between apps and web APIs.

Then, we executed a network request with Retrofit in our Restaurants application and learned how the JSON content that is sent by the server can be parsed or deserialized by our Retrofit networking client. We also learned how to correctly wait for network responses and how to notify the application when responses arrive.

Finally, we solved some common issues that occur when our applications communicate with web APIs asynchronously to retrieve data, especially in the context of Compose.

In the next chapter, we'll explore a very efficient tool in Android...