This Week’s Links
Fragmented Podcast Episode #138: Decompress – Kotlin Scripting
In this mini Fragmented episode, Donn (@donnfelker) asks Kaushik (@kaushikgopal) about a recent hackathon side project that he worked on with Kotlin scripting. They go into Kotlin scripting (using kscript), pros cons, setting it up and more. They’ve added links some interesting resources, so you want to make sure you check out the show notes for this one to explore Kotlin scripting and see if it’s a fit for you.
Google Play Offline Peer to Peer Installs Beta
To help developers reach a wider audience, particularly in countries where peer-to-peer app sharing is common, Google started adding security metadata to all apps and app updates to help verify product authenticity from Google Play. Read more about this important step to improve the integrity of Google Play’s mobile app ecosystem in this post.
Elevating User Trust in our API Ecosystem
Google API platforms have a long history of enabling a vibrant and secure third-party app ecosystem for developers—from the original launch of OAuth which helped users safeguard passwords, to launching controls to help G Suite admins manage app access in the workplace. To provide additional assurances for users, this week Google announced new policies, focused on Gmail APIs, which will go into effect January 9, 2019.
TextClassification – Part 3
In Android Oreo, a new TextClassification system was introduced. This has been further refined in Android Pie. In this short series, take a look at what this is, how to use it, and how you can add custom behaviors to it.
React Native Is Native
React Native apps are native apps. It’s a heck of a coup they’ve pulled off. Whether you agree that React Native is truly native, this article explores the author’s concerns around adopting the technology.
MobileLab: Highly Accurate Testing to Prevent Mobile Performance Regressions
Today, Facebook’s apps are optimized so much that a majority of their time is best spent preventing tiny regressions that, if shipped, could cause their progress to backslide. At Facebook’s scale, that means checking thousands of commits per day to find regressions as tiny as 1 percent. Previous methods worked well for spotting large performance changes, but to refine the accuracy, they built a new system, called MobileLab, in which our tests and environment could be substantially more deterministic. Read more about MobileLab in this post.
Google App Suite Costs as Much as $40 Per Phone Under New EU Android Deal
Android manufacturers will have to pay Google a surprisingly high cost in Europe in order to include Google’s Play Store and other mobile apps on their devices, according to documents obtained by The Verge. A confidential fee schedule shows costs as high as $40 per device to install the “Google Mobile Services” suite of apps, which includes the Google Play Store. The new fees vary depending on country and device type, and it would apply to devices activated on or after February 1st, 2019.
Architecture Components & MVP\MVVM
You may have heard of the architecture components library. However, if your app is built with an MVP architecture or MVVM architecture, there are specific barriers to using it. This post explores new ideas and approaches to crossing these barriers.
Creating an Extendable Floating Action Button in Android
Earlier this year, Google announced changes to Material Design in the form of Material Theming. Now, Material Design is now more malleable, allowing it to better represent your brand, and look less sterile and cookie cutter. Among the changes was the reimagining of the Floating Action Button, making it a little less cryptic and more dynamic. Learn more about the Floating Action Button changes in this article.
Video
Caster.io: Android Studio – JSON Scratch Files
In this lesson byte, learn how to speed up your daily Android development with scratch files. You’ll learn how you can create a scratch file with JSON data, rename that file to something meaningful, and view all of your saved scratches. It’s one of my favorite tricks when working with JSON in Android Studio.
Caster.io: Gradle Dependency Management: Using Kotlin and buildSrc for build.gradle Autocomplete in Android Studio
Did you know you can write Kotlin in a module named buildSrc to manage your dependencies in your Gradle files? How? When you run Gradle, it checks for the existence of a directory called buildSrc.Gradle then automatically compiles this code and puts it in the classpath of your build script. You don’t need to provide any further instruction. It may not seem like it’s that big of a deal, but managing Gradle dependencies is a pain, and getting to use Kotlin and having autocomplete in Android Studios is a game changer.
Open Source
Android-GoldenEye
Android Golden Eye is a Camera1 and Camera2 API wrapper, which exposes a simple to use interface. GoldenEye supports multiple Camera features that can be changed at runtime, including the flash mode, focus mode, preview scale and many more.
IBackdrop
Use this library to simply setup a backdrop in your project since. Currently, there is not an easy way to implement a backdrop in your project.