How to Make Your Own Android Camera App without Knowing How

Weird title? Yeah, you won’t be learning “how to do x” if you already know how.

This post is inspired by a recent attempt I made to build an app for scanning texts (characters) in images. I am kind of an advocate of learning by doing so I decided to put up a tutorial for any Android beginners looking to build a simple app that does some very common tasks.

If you are learning Android development, and already have Android Studio setup you should be able to follow along.

I didn’t include a detailed description of the code included in this post in order to keep the post short. Feel free to check the codelab linked in the post to learn more about the code.

Getting Started

CameraX is a member of the Jetpack library family that helps Android developers use the device camera feature with minimum worries about compatibility.

If you are new to Android development, AndroidX (Jetpack)generally (in my own words) is a set of libraries that enable developers to use new features without worrying too much about support for older versions of Android OS. It was previously known as Support Library.

In this post, you will learn how to build a simple Camera App using Jetpack’s CameraX library.

Pre-requisites

To follow along, you will need the following:

1. Android Studio 3.6+