LiveData and LiveData Observers

Introduction

The LiveData class is one of the Android architectural components that helps keep the UI up to date with the latest data every time it changes. This class reduces the need for manual data updating every time new data becomes available.

ViewModel and LiveData are both lifecycle-aware components. When the activity enters an inactive state, the listeners are unsubscribed. Using LiveData reduces memory leaks as LiveData observers are triggered only when the activity is in an active state.

In this lesson, we’ll learn how to use LiveData through a simple example in order to understand its advantages over manual UI updates.

Let’s jump right in and learn how to use LiveData in an Android application.

Add library dependencies

To use the ViewModel lifecycle component in our app, we first need to add the following dependencies in our app/build.gradle file.