31.1 What is Android Jetpack?

Android Jetpack consists of Android Studio, the Android Architecture Components and Android Support Library together with a set of guidelines that recommend how an Android App should be structured. The Android Architecture Components are designed to make it quicker and easier both to perform common tasks when developing Android apps while also conforming to the key principle of the architectural guidelines.

While all of the Android Architecture Components will be covered in this book, the objective of this chapter is to introduce the key architectural guidelines together with the ViewModel, LiveData, Lifecycle components while also introducing Data Binding and the use of Repositories.

Before moving on, it is important to understand the Jetpack approach to app development is not mandatory. While highlighting some of the shortcoming of other techniques that have gained popularity of the years, Google stopped short of completely condemning those approaches...