Which Architecture Patterns Are Used on Android

Which Architecture patterns are used on Android?

I tried using both the model–view–controller (MVC) and model–view–presenter architectural patterns for doing android development. My findings are model–view–controller works fine, but there are a couple of "issues". It all comes down to how you perceive the Android Activity class. Is it a controller, or is it a view?

The actual Activity class doesn't extend Android's View class, but it does, however, handle displaying a window to the user and also handle the events of that window (onCreate, onPause, etc.).

This means, that when you are using an MVC pattern, your controller will actually be a pseudo view–controller. Since it is handling displaying a window to the user, with the additional view components you have added to it with setContentView, and also handling events for at least the various activity life cycle events.

In MVC, the controller is supposed to be the main entry point. Which is a bit debatable if this is the case when applying it to Android development, since the activity is the natural entry point of most applications.

Because of this, I personally find that the model–view–presenter pattern is a perfect fit for Android development. Since the view's role in this pattern is:

• Serving as a entry point
• Rendering components
• Routing user events to the presenter

This allows you to implement your model like so:

View - this contains your UI components, and handles events for them.

Presenter - this will handle communication between your model and your view, look at it as a gateway to your model. Meaning, if you have a complex domain model representing, God knows what, and your view only needs a very small subset of this model, the presenters job is to query the model and then update the view. For example, if you have a model containing a paragraph of text, a headline and a word-count. But in a given view, you only need to display the headline in the view. Then the presenter will read the data needed from the model, and update the view accordingly.

Model - this should basically be your full domain model. Hopefully it will help making your domain model more "tight" as well, since you won't need special methods to deal with cases as mentioned above.

By decoupling the model from the view all together (through use of the presenter), it also becomes much more intuitive to test your model. You can have unit tests for your domain model, and unit tests for your presenters.

Try it out. I personally find it a great fit for Android development.

What are the architectural patterns used in Mobile applications (other than MVC)?

There are many derivative of MVC like MVW, MVVM etc and other patterns at server side like Repository and UoW are being used for mobile apps.

To start with, here is the Mobile Architecture Guide from Microsoft:
http://robtiffany.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Mobile_Architecture_Guide_v1.1.pdf

Additionally below links would help you a lot:
Mobile Development Architecture & Design Patterns
Thanks.

design patterns used by Android components

MVP, MVC, MVVM are architectural patterns, not design patterns. I quote an old SO post about the question that you were asked.

Which design patterns are used on Android?

Android Architectural patterns

You might want to put your network communication in a Service instead of AsyncTask or Thread.
Your architecture sounds like some form of MVC which is good in my opinion.

I think the Activity is a good starting point for you. Learn it's lifecycle and how to present your data to the user. You can also read more about threads and connectivity to see for yourself how it's done in android.

Clean architecture pattern Android

Check out this project for a clean architecture framework for Android. https://github.com/Karumi/Rosie. To answer your question though - I personally separate the network components for each module, and inject them into the appropriate feature modules that need them. For example, imagine I'm creating some sort of twitter client - I might have a class FeedManager, which exposes methods to fetch the feed, and TweetManager, which exposes methods to create a new tweet. It's a little overkill for this example though, since FeedManager and TweetManager might be very small.

Be wary of over-architecting too early on. Having a single Network module that has methods for every network request in the app is a code smell and becomes hard to maintain as your app grows. But, if your app is small, having multiple Network classes that each do a tiny thing might also be overkill, and you'd likely benefit from having only a single networking module.

Also - don't feel like you have to go whole hog on Clean Architecture - it's ok to merge multiple layers into a single layer if it suits your app. I made this mistake while trying to implement VIPER (a clean architecture derivative) 'by the book', and ended up having several extra classes for each feature that basically did nothing but pass the data onto the next layer, and it became a huge hassle to maintain. Clean Architecture may be a godsend for a large complex project where separation of concerns to the extreme is necessary, but for most Android apps I've seen, the much simpler MVC, MVVM, or MVP will be good enough.

How to understand the VIPER clean architecture?

We developer basically uses the MVC,MVP or MVVM architecture for the development as per the requirement. It is mattering which architecture you are choose to develop the application. Many factors affecting for selection of the software architecture like system designs, requirements, time-lines etc.

In Viper architecture, each block corresponds to an object with specific tasks, inputs and outputs. It is very similar to workers in an assembly line: once the worker completes its job on an object, the object is passed along to the next worker, until the product is finished.

V (View): View is responsible for the UI updates and show whatever the presenter tells it.

I (Interactor) : The Interactor is responsible for fetching data from the model layer, and its implementation is totally independent of the user interface.All the business logic written inside the Interactor. E.g. Get User Data API call written in the Interactor.

P (Presenter): Presenter performing role as intermediator it gets data from interaction and passes to View. (It may be data or any user action)

E (Entity): Basically it is contains the Object Model which is used by Interactor. E.g. Student,Friend,College etc.

R (Router): It contains navigation logic for the application. E.g. Next button action shows second screen.

Morever, I’ve use the PROTOCOL, which contains all the rules and work-flow for the particular module of the application. In iOS all the protocols written in the separate protocol swift file for each module.

Benefits:

-All the modules are independent so VIPER is really good for large teams.

-It makes the source code cleaner, more compact and reusable

-It easier to adopt TDD (Test Driven Development)

-You can add easily new features to the existing application without changing other modules possibly.

-It can be applies SOLID principles.

-Reduced number of merge conflicts.

-It Makes it easy to write automated tests since your UI logic is separated from the business logic

Reference: https://javedmultani16.medium.com/viper-architecture-viper-d740d98b7529

architectural patterns for developing on android

You should definitely read the Application Fundamentals Dev Guide

In my experience, my design patterns in Android have been driven by the use of Intents, Activities, Services, Broadcast receivers and so forth.

I wouldn't say that "strict model separation from view is a common practice". You can keep data inside an Activity, but you will be forced to preserve it. Luckily this is made trivial by methods like onSaveInstanceState and onRestoreInstanceState where persistent data members can be saved to a Bundle and then retrieved from the same Bundle.

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