We live in the era of digital communication. Handheld devices play a huge role in communication and impact the way people interact. In the previous chapter, we discussed one of the powerful functions of Android—identifying the location of the user and customizing services based on location. In this chapter, we will focus on one of the most useful and powerful features of the Android devices—networking and connecting to the outside world.

While we will provide brief coverage on the important concepts of network connectivity and the Android framework support for networking, we will specifically focus on configuration and the usage of various built-in, third-party libraries. We will also learn how to load an image from a URL and display it in the sample app we create.

We will be covering the following:

• Network connectivity
• Android framework support for networking
• Usage of built-in libraries
• Usage of third-party libraries