At Google I/O this year we saw the introduction of Firebase MLKit, a part of the Firebase suite that intends to give our apps the ability to support intelligent features with more ease. With this comes the face recognition feature, giving us the ability to recognise faces along with the ‘landmarks’ (nose, eyes etc) and… Continue reading
Version 28 of the Android support library was recently announced — within the current alpha version there is a collection of exciting new components that we now have access to. In this article, I want to take a look at the additions which have been made to the Support library in the form of Material view components…. Continue reading
A few weeks or so ago the first developer preview of Android P was made available to us. Along with this announcement we were introduced to a number of new features and APIs made available to us in this release of Android. Whilst it is still early days (and there are likely new things /… Continue reading
A few days ago the first developer preview of Android P was made available to us. Along with this announcement we were introduced to a number of new features and APIs made available to us in this release of Android. Whilst it is still early days (and there are likely new things / changes to… Continue reading
Yesterday Google announced android-ktx, which is a set of Kotlin extensions for Android app development. It looks like the aim of the library is to continue with the advantages that kotlin brings to our project — less code, more fun and a simpler to understand project. Now, the library is only in preview so it is likely… Continue reading
In-app billing is a powerful part of the Android framework that allows us to easily monetise our applications with in-app purchases and subscriptions. Google previously provided us with the in-app billing which allows us to implement this within our apps. However, I remember this never being exactly a straightforward task — we’d have to add a InAppBillingService… Continue reading
At the Firebase Summit this week there were several exciting things that were shared with the community — the one that caught my eye the most was Firebase Predictions. This new service allows you to utilise Firebase to predict the behaviour of users in your app, allowing you to provide personalised experiences that can be used to… Continue reading
Last week I pushed a fork of the Buffer Android Boilerplate to a public repository — the difference with this fork is that it uses the new architecture components (ViewModels in the presentation layer and Room in the cache layer). If you haven’t seen it yet, you can do so here 👉 But we’re not here to… Continue reading
Emojis are everywhere — it’s hard to visit a website, app or have a conversation without emojis popping up somewhere along the line 😀 Because of this, it’s important that all users who are involved in these kind of activities are able to see the emojis being used. If not, textual content can be misunderstood or misinterpreted…. Continue reading
Last week came the official announcement of the Android O release. This release of Android comes with some really cool new additions, and in this post I want to look specifically at the new restrictions that have been introduced for background services. If you’re using background services in your app then changes could affect your… Continue reading