COVID-19 TRACKER Android Application (Introduction)
Published: 2020-04-15 00:55:50

### **About**
COVID-19 Tracker allows you to monitor the number of COVID-19 cases around the globe and different countries as the spread of disease is increasing. The sole purpose of this application is to keep you aware of the spread of disease around you and help you share credible and trustworthy information with your friends and family.
<p align=left>
<img align="left" alt="Home" height="300" width="200" src="https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ba7f6ntm2astrnx5621w.jpg">
</p>

This application gets most of the data from different credible REST APIs. It is very crucial to understand how does REST API works. A REST API is an interface that uses HTTP requests to perform multiple tasks using data. Some of the common HTTP protocols are GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. An application program interface (API) is a code for a website that allows two software programs to communicate with each other. A REST API is an architectural approach to communicate between two different software entities. It follows the Client-Server model. We make HTTP requests using browsers every day and calling a REST API works the same way except you would have to define some optional or required headers, key-value, or authorization on your own.

COVID-19 Tracker app calls two different REST API to GET data in the form of the JSON format. This data contains information about COVID-19 confirmed, recovered, and fatal cases for different countries. There are different from where you can retrieve data, but I found a reliable and credible API on the <i>RapidAPI</i> website.

This application contains four different pages (Home, Stats, News, Help) along unique purposes. 


* **Home page**: Includes global statistics view so that you can take a quick glance and know the total spread of corona-virus pandemic around the globe. This page also includes a bar-chart for the top 5 countries with information about their confirmed, active, and fatal cases so that you can compare them with each other.

* **Stats page**: This is the page where you will see all the countries that are affected by corona-virus. You can view specific detail like confirmed, active, recovered, fatal, new cases, new deaths, serious critical, total cases per one million population for each country. With the help of search functionality, you can find any country details. You get all this information from a reliable source that gets updated every minute.

* **News page**: This page makes this application a 'one-stop' application. You can read all the corona-virus news from different authentic sources here. You can also select a different country to read their news. This page is supported by 'Google News API' which means that it gets updated frequently and contains news from diverse sources.

* **Help page**: Our Help page allows you to get access to a screening tool developed by Apple, CDC, White House, and FEMA. This page will keep getting updated in the future with useful resources and information on how to protect yourself from corona-virus.

In the upcoming blog, I will share my code and best practices to create these pages. I will also share some of the unique concepts that I've learned over the building period of this app.

Stay tuned! :bell:

{% github sukhbirsekhon/LocalEvents no-readme %}