Adding Activities to apps gives them more versatility for performing tasks. Today, I show you step by step how to add them to your apps.

In this tutorial, I show you how to add additional Activities to your Android Applications. You can find a video of this at the bottom of the page, code snippets throughout the page, and a link to my source code here.

NOTE: Remember to click Apply Changes in the Android Studio toolbar to update your app! 

Beginners: You can download this project from the link above and open it in Android Studio while you follow along with the video.
Advanced: I’ve included steps throughout the page along with code snippets. Feel free to use the video as a reference as well.

Requirements

• Android Studio and a newly created project with an empty Activity
• An Android Virtual Device
• BONUS: An IDE of your preference if you don’t want to use Android Studio to edit your code

Step 1: Add two new Activities and layouts to your project.

• Right-click your classes and select to add each new class and each new layout.
• For this example, we will call the two classes Second.class, and Third.class.
• We will call the two layouts second.xml, and third.xml.

Step 2: Update the AndroidManifest with the two new Activity names. You can update your AndroidManifest.xml file using the code below

• Add Activity Tags
• Use the android:name XML attribute to add .Second and .Third for the new Activities.
• NOTE: You may see red squigglies under these Activity names. You can ignore this for now.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    package="com.example.clickingactivities">

    <application
        android:allowBackup="true"
        android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"
        android:label="@string/app_name"
        android:roundIcon="@mipmap/ic_launcher_round"
        android:supportsRtl="true"
        android:theme="@style/AppTheme">
        <activity android:name=".MainActivity">
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />

                <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
            </intent-filter>
        </activity>

        <activity android:name=".Second"></activity>
        <activity android:name=".Third"></activity>
    </application>

</manifest>

Step 3: Import the classes needed to make changes within the app in your MainActivity.java file. See the snippet after Step 5 for the entire MainActivity.java file.

import android.content.Intent;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.support.v7.app.AppCompatActivity;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.Button;

Step 4: Set the title of the MainActivity as Act One. See the snippet after Step 5 for the entire MainActivity.java file.

getSupportActionBar().setTitle("Act One");

Step 5: Repeat steps 3 and 4 for the Second.java and Third.java files. See the code in MainActivity.java below.

• Import the classes from Step 3
• Set the titles as “Act Two” and “Act Three” respectively using the method in Step 4

package com.example.clickingactivities;

import android.content.Intent;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.support.v7.app.AppCompatActivity;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.Button;

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

        getSupportActionBar().setTitle("Act One");
    }
}

To see this in action, watch the YouTube video below. In the next part of this tutorial, we will configure buttons to open our new Activities.

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