This Week’s Links

Android Q Scoped Storage: Best Practices and Updates
Within Android, Application Sandboxing is a core part of the design, which includes isolating apps from each other. In Android Q, taking the same fundamental principle from Application Sandboxing, Google has introduced Scoped Storage. In this post, Google shares options for declaring your app’s support for Scoped Storage on Android Q devices, and best practices for questions they’ve heard from the developer community.

A New Home For Developers On Instagram
This week, the Google Developers Blog was excited to announce the official launch of @googledevs, a new hub for developer culture where Google will shine a spotlight on communities around the world and make new friends at events like Google I/O, The Android Dev Summit, Flutter Live, and more.

Kotlin: Function References​
Kotlin is a very feature rich language with and the subtleties of some of these features are worthy of some exploration to fully appreciate. In this ad-hoc series on Styling Android blog, look at some of these, and in this article look at function references and some of the really nice tricks developers can achieve with them.

Square In-App Payments SDK for Flutter​
Square’s In-App Payments SDK lets developers accept Square-powered payments from within their own mobile apps. With the Flutter plugin for In-App Payments SDK, users can take payments in Flutter. In this post, take a closer look at how to take credit card payments in Flutter!

Writing your Gradle Build Scripts in Kotlin on Android
The folks at Gradle recently released version 5.0, which means that Android developers now have access to Gradle Kotlin DSL v1.0! This means that developers can write Gradle build scripts in the favorite language, Kotlin. Read more about how to accomplish this in this post.

Updates to Non-SDK Interface Restrictions in Android Q
To help ensure app stability and compatibility, Google has started restricting which non-SDK interfaces your app can use in Android 9 (API level 28). Android Q includes updated lists of restricted non-SDK interfaces based on collaboration with Android developers and the latest internal testing. Read more about these restrictions in this post.

Videos

 Caster.io: Testing Intents
In this lesson, learn how to test Intents. This lesson also covers how to write a small DSL function that makes intent creation cleaner and easier.
 
Caster.io: Views and Events
Next, we need a View. Views are the source of user interaction events. In this lesson, we’ll build the output side of a ViewContract interface. We’ll start the implementation with the Task Add/Edit screens, using the RxBinding library.

Open Source

Media Picker
Use this free media library for Android to select single/multiple media files(image/video/audio) within your app.  Click the link for instructions on setup and integration into your project.

Holdy
Holdy is an Android Library that can easily load any fragment in a provided container or library. This library will help encourage developers to minimize fragments, which reduces application size. When utilizing Holdy, developers can easily deal with many fragments.

This Week’s Links

Optimize Your Subscriptions with New Insights in the Play Console
Since launching on Google Play nearly 7 years ago, subscriptions have proven to be an essential element in creating sustainable mobile app businesses. As the market matures, it is becoming increasingly important for subscription developers to optimize both subscriber conversion and retention in order to maintain growth. To help developers do that, Google is rolling out new insights available directly in the Play Console.

Introducing PySurvival​
This week, the team at Square introduced PySurvival. PySurvival is an open source python package for Survival Analysis modeling — the modeling concept used to analyze or predict when an event is likely to happen. It is built on top the most commonly used machine learning packages: NumPy, SciPy, and PyTorch. Read more about it in this post.

Implementing ML Kit’s Smart Reply API in an Android app​
Following up from the previous blog posts covering the APIs available in Firebase’s ML Kit, this post covers one of the most recently released APIs—Smart Reply, which allows you to implement automatic replies based on previous bits of conversation in your Android app.

How to Distribute Android Libraries
Even the best library is barely usable if potential users cannot get it easily. That’s why every library should be distributed. In this article, learn how and where to publish your libraries in the most efficient way.

The Ultimate Account Security is Now in Your Pocket
Two-step verification (or 2SV) makes it even harder for attackers to gain access to your accounts by adding one more step to the sign-in process. While any form of 2SV, like SMS text message codes and push notifications, improves the security of your account, sophisticated attackers can skirt around them by targeting users with a fake sign-in page to steal your credentials. Now, developers have one more option—and it’s already in your pocket. Starting in beta, your phone can be your security key—it’s built into devices running Android 7.0+. This makes it easier and more convenient for developers and users to unlock this powerful protection, without having to carry around additional security keys. 

Android Studio Project Marble: Lint Performance​
After using Android Lint as their static analysis framework for finding potential code issues. Many of the warnings you see in the IDE editor come from Lint, and developers often set up Lint to run on a continuous integration server in order to enforce those warnings on each new code change. Lint has now grown to hundreds of detectors each looking for a different set of potential issues. However, Lint could be slow. In this blog post read about their investigation into Lint performance and how it can be improved. 

Videos

Caster.io: Setting Up our Application
In this lesson, we set up our Android MVI application project. We’ll sketch the overall structure of our app. Then we’ll go over what libraries we use, and why.

Caster.io: Defining Model and State
We’ll be building a TODO app. So we’re looking at a connected list-detail type app, with basic create, update and delete functionality. In this lesson, let’s build our Model State data classes and the Model interface.

Open Source

Pager
This is an Android library that can help you make animated pages menu. You can build a menu with pages and can easily go from one part of menu to another with animations. The clean and simple working of the library makes it very lightweight and easy to add in your code.

Streaming Android Logger
Streaming Android Logger is a convenient logger that adds support to having multiple different loggers and different log levels for each one of them. Streaming logs directly from your android phone as webserver.

This Week’s Links

Fragmented Podcast Ep#157: Effective Java Item# 20 – Prefer interfaces to abstract classes
In this episode, Donn (@donnfelker) talks about Item #20 in the Effective Java book (third series) by Joshua Bloch. He discusses why you should think about using interfaces over abstract classes, how they can add mixin like behavior to retrofit existing classes with new behavior, default methods, skeleton implementations and more.

ML Kit expands into NLP with Language Identification and Smart Reply
This week, Google announced the release of two new features to ML Kit: Language Identification and Smart Reply. Both of these features are different from Google’s exisiting APIs, with the goal to offer powerful, but easy to use.

Adding Tools Attributes to Your Toolbox​
Android Tools Attributes are a critical element of any well designed app. In this post, take a look at why these attributes are important and how you can apply them to provide design-time hints to Android Studio.

Image Segmentation for Android — Smart Background Replacement with Fritz​
In this tutorial, learn to use the Fritz SDK, a mobile machine learning library, to create an app to replace and modify the background of a photo.

Jobs (these are pulled from www.androidjobs.io) Head of Product at Soda Labs (Los Angeles/Remote) Need to hire an Android professional? Post a job here

Android Things is no longer for “Things,” focuses on smart speakers and displays​
Android Things, Google’s stripped-down version of Android named for its focus on the “Internet of Things” (IoT), has changed its focus. Now, Android Things is focusing more on Smart Displays and Smart Speakers. Read more about the focus shift in this post.

What is Android Lint and How it Helps Write Maintainable Code
When developers aren’t careful, things can go south quickly. One example is using an API that is incompatible with older versions. That’s where Lint comes in. in this post, read how you can use Android Lint to write maintainable code.

ViewModels: State Persistence — SavedState
For each app that’s launched on an Android device, the system creates a process to run it. When an app is no longer in the foreground, the system doesn’t kill its process, but it keeps it in a -least recently used- cache. But when the system is low on memory, the app is killed and will restart when the user opens it. However, there are times when you’ll want to save the state it was left in. In this post, learn how to use a new library called ViewModel SavedState, which is part of Jetpack and still in alpha.

Videos

Caster.io: Introduction to MvRx
MvRx is an Android architecture built on top of Android Jetpack that is designed to make practical Android development easier, faster, and more fun. This lesson will walk through the creation of a simple hello world screen and will introduce you to some common pitfalls and challenges that are involved with Android development that MvRx helps with.

Caster.io: Set up Your Project for MvRx
To begin using MvRx, you must add the dependency to your build.gradle file. Learn what you need to add and how to make sure you have the most up-to-date version.

Open Source

LookAtMe
LookAtMe is an open source android library that easily provides you a VideoView you can use to know if the user is watching or not. This way, you can always know if the user watched the video or not, because if the video was finished, the video was watched.

Calc
Calc is a tiny expression calculator developers can use anywhere in their forms, where they expect the user may want to quickly calculate things. Supported opperations include: + add expressions, – subtract expressions or change sign, * multiply expressions, / divide expressions, % get the remainder, ^ calculate power, () group expressions, sin calculate sine (degrees), cos calculate cosine (degrees), and tan calculate tangent (degrees).

This Week’s Links

Fragmented Podcast Update – TSHIRTS​
The team at Fragmented is extremely excited to announce a brand new T-shirt sale. Their last run with the Spacedroid was so successful with listeners that we decided to work again with our good friend Taylor Ling for this brand new design.Taylor’s DroidTee designs have gained legendary fame amongst Android devs and this time he’s made something extra special just for us. Click to find out what it is!

AOSP Application Updates
When Google started the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) 10 years ago, Google included some basic applications. However, as the Android ecosystem has matured over time, Google has noticed a healthy growth of alternative applications – both as open source and proprietary implementations – developed by the developer community. Late last year, Google began to clean up these applications in AOSP to focus more effectively on the last purpose — their role to provide functionality to other Android applications as part of the platform. To day – three apps have been cleaned up: Music, Calendar, and Calculator.

Android: Using Physics-Based Animations in Custom Views (SpringAnimation)
If you’ve used all the standard Android animation techniques, but you find that they sometimes just don’t give you that extra sparkle you are looking for. Now, you’re looking for a way to create more natural looking animations and had no luck thinking about how to do it yourself. In this artilce read to learn how to create beautiful, natural, physics-based animations in your app.

The Road to an Envoy Service Mesh
The team at Square has been running a microservices architecture for years, primarily using three different languages: Java, Ruby and Go. This can make interoperability between the different languages/frameworks challenging. In this post, learn how Square has handled this in the past and where their team is at today — actively migrating towards a full service mesh.

Jobs (these are pulled from www.androidjobs.io) Senior Software Engineer, Android at Under Armour (San Francisco, CA) Head of Product at Soda Labs (Los Angeles/Remote) Need to hire an Android professional? Post a job here

Automating Android Build-Test-Release Cycle​
In this post, learn how to integrate CircleCI’s workflow-enabled reductions in development-to-deployment time to make testing more robust. While the automated testing should be an integral part of any software development lifecycle, setting up build servers may seem like a daunting task initially but provides benefits in the longer run: team productivity and efficiency increases and bugs can be detected early.

Maintaining Compatibility in Kotlin Libraries​
Mobile development has historically required development on two or more distinct platforms and toolkits. This article explores the need for a platform that will ideally have the ability selectively share common logic across platforms with minimal friction while leveraging the intricacies of each platform enables teams to focus their energies on delivering features and value to the only stakeholder that truly matters — the users of your app.

Google I/O 2019 Schedule Includes Sessions on Stadia, Dark Mode, Lots of Assistant, but no Wear OS​
The Google I/O schedule is now up for all to see. While it doesn’t list all the smaller sessions, it does give us a good idea of which areas Google is likely to focus on most this year.

Videos