When distributing our Android Applications we’ve always been required to sign our APK using a keystore for our application — this has allowed us to ensure that only the developer(s) of our app are able to upload updated APKs to the play console. However, because this keystore acts as a fingerprint to the lifecycle of our application — if… Continue reading
Author Archives → hitherejoe
Exploring Actions on Google Responses: Simple Response
When sending responses from our Actions on Google conversational tools, there are a number of different ways in which we can present content to our users. In this post we’re going to look at adding responses to our conversations using the Simple Response. When building responses for our conversation tools we have the ability to… Continue reading
An introduction to UI Testing on iOS
I’ve always been a big fan of UI testing where appropriate, we can use it to automate the validation of visual components in our applications which allows us to reduce bugs, regressions and confusing behaviour within our applications — all helping us to save time from manually checking the behaviour and display of our view components. In… Continue reading
Building HashTrack with Flutter: Authentication logic
If you haven’t check out the previous post in these series, then you can do so here: Building HashTrack with Flutter: Intro and setup Building HashTrack with Flutter: Main class and Localization setup You can also find the code for this guide here: Now that we have the foundations of our application built, we’re going… Continue reading
Exploring Android P: Enhanced Notifications
With Android P now out in the wild, there are a bunch of new features and APIs which have become available for us to make use of in our applications. Some of these new features fall under the notification APIs, allowing us to create more contextual and detailed notifications for our applications. In this post,… Continue reading
Building HashTrack with Flutter: Main class and Localization setup
If you haven’t check out the previous post in these series, then you can do so here: Building HashTrack with Flutter: Intro and setup You can also find the code for this guide here: Now that our project is setup, we’re ready to go ahead and start building our application. In this post we’re going… Continue reading
Exploring the Android App Bundle
There were a ton of exciting things announced at I/O this year — one of the things that caught my eyes the most was the new app bundle format. Not only does this format provide a new upload format for our applications, but it will help to influence how we build and structure our applications in a… Continue reading
Exposing Notification Settings to the Android System
Have you ever looked at the Android System settings page for a specific application and wondered about the option to view “Additional settings in the app”? If you haven’t seen this before in your settings, or aren’t aware of it, this is what it looks like: This option allows developers to essentially provide a link… Continue reading
Exploring Image Keyboard Support on Android
During a recent hack day we added a bunch of small but impactful features into our application, one of these being integration with the GIF input provided by the Google keyboard. This involved us making use of the Image Keyboard Support (IKS) functionality that was introduced in Android 7.1 (API level 25), this allows us… Continue reading
Building HashTrack with Flutter: Intro and setup
Welcome to the first post of this little series that I’m going to be publishing ~ every week from now. In this collection of posts I want to run you through creating a simple app with Flutter. Within this series we’ll be creating an application that allows us to track a collection of hashtags for… Continue reading