Since the introduction of the Navigation Component on Android, navigating the different parts of our application has become much more pleasant to implement. We’ve been able to better decouple navigation logic from our activities and fragments, along with being able to test these paths with more ease. However, the Navigation Component has only ever allowed… Continue reading
Posts Tagged → AndroidDev
Exploring Firebase UI on Android: Authentication
Firebase UI provides us with a collection of utilities that make it easier to implement common UI components within applications. Firebase authentication provides us a way for our users to validate their identity, without the need to implement all of the back-end work ourselves. hen compared to interacting with the authentication APIs directly, Firebase Authentication… Continue reading
Digging into failed redirects within Android Webviews
Header Photo by The Nigmatic on Unsplash Discovering the issue It was the 14th December and we were winding down ready for the Christmas break. Our code freeze had kicked in several days previously and we had shipped an update at that time to get a couple of priority bug fixes before the holidays. We… Continue reading
Exploring the Android Fragment Scenario component
I’m always curious about what tools and features are coming up next in android — and to be sure I don’t miss out on any of this I like to keep an eye on release notes over on the android developer site. Two that caught my eye recently where the fragment-1.1.0-alpha01 and fragment-testing-1.1.0-alpha01 releases, within the testing… Continue reading
Exploring Google Play App Signing
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
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
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
Modularizing Android Applications
We’ve all been there. Single module android applications — at some point in our Android development career it’s likely we’ve worked on, or are working on, a project that consists of a single module. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that at all and in a lot of cases, a single module will most likely do the job…. Continue reading