Xamarin.Android Platform Features

Article
08/21/2018

Documents in this section cover features specific to Android. Here you'll find topics such as using Fragments, working with maps, and encapsulating data with Content Providers.

Android Beam

Android Beam is a new Near Field Communication (NFC) technology in Android 4 that allows applications to share information over NFC when in close proximity.

Working with Files

This section discusses how to access files in Xamarin.Android.

Fingerprint Authentication

This section discusses how to use fingerprint authentication, first introduced in Android 6.0, to a Xamarin.Android application.

Firebase Job Dispatcher

This guide discusses the Firebase Job Dispatcher and how to use it to simplify running background jobs in a Xamarin.Android app.

Android 3.0 introduced Fragments, showing how to support more flexible designs for the many different screen sizes found on phones and tablets. This article will cover how to use Fragments to develop Xamarin.Android applications, and also how to support Fragments on pre-Android 3.0 (API Level 11) devices.

App-Linking

This guide will discuss how Android 6.0 supports app-linking, a technique that allows mobile apps to respond to URLs on websites. It will discuss how to implement app-linking in an Android 6.0 application and how to configure a website to grant permissions to the mobile app to handle app-links for the domain.

AndroidX

This article provides an outline of using AndroidX within your Xamarin.Android projects and provides links to documentation that illustrates how to migrate your application from the Android Support Library to AndroidX.

Android 10

This article provides an outline of the new features in Android 10, explains how to prepare Xamarin.Android for Android 10 development, and provides links to sample applications that illustrate how to use Android Oreo features in Xamarin.Android apps.

Android 9 Pie

This article provides an outline of the new features in Android Pie, explains how to prepare Xamarin.Android for Android Pie development, and provides an example app that illustrates how to use the new Android Pie display cutout and notification features in Xamarin.Android apps.

Android 8 Oreo

This article provides an outline of the new features in Android Oreo, explains how to prepare Xamarin.Android for Android Oreo development, and provides links to sample applications that illustrate how to use Android Oreo features in Xamarin.Android apps.

Android 7 Nougat

This article provides a high-level overview of the new features introduced in Android 7.0 Nougat.

Android 6 Marshmallow

This article provides a high-level overview of the new features introduced in Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

Android 5 Lollipop

This guide provides an overview of new Android 5.0 Lollipop features such as Material Theme, CardView, RecyclerView, and Heads Up Notifications, and it links to in-depth articles that help you use these new features in your app.

Android 4.4 KitKat

Android 4.4 (KitKat) comes loaded with a cornucopia of features for users and developers both. This guide highlights several of these features and provides code examples and implementation details to help you make the most out of KitKat.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

This document will provide a high-level overview of the new features for developers that were introduced in Android 4.1. These features include: enhanced notifications, updates to Android Beam to share large files, updates to multimedia, peer-to-peer network discovery, animations, new permissions.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

This article describes several of the new features available to application developers with the Android 4 API - Ice Cream Sandwich. It covers several new user interface technologies and then examines a variety of new capabilities that Android 4 offers for sharing data between applications and between devices.

Working with the Android Manifest

This article introduces the AndroidManifest.xml file, and how it maybe be used to control functionality and describe the requirements of a Mono for Android application.

Introduction to Content Providers

A ContentProvider encapsulates a data repository and provides an API to access it. The provider exists as part of an Android application that also provides a UI for displaying/managing the data. The key benefit of using a content provider is enabling other applications to easily access the encapsulated data using a provider client object (called a ContentResolver). Together a content provider and content resolver offer a consistent inter-application API for data access that is simple to build and consume. This document shows how to access and build ContentProviders with Xamarin.Android.

Maps and Location

This section discusses how to use maps and location with Xamarin.Android. It covers everything from leveraging the built-in maps application to using the Google Maps Android API v2 directly. Additionally, it explains how to use a single API to work with location services, which use cellular triangulation to allow an application to obtain location fixes, Wi-Fi location, and GPS.

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