Day-to-day tasks as an Android Developer can consist of varying jobs to complete your work effectively. Whether it is making sure your network requests are correct or ensuring pixel-perfect screens, there are a few tools that have made my day-to-day development easier. These are some of my favourites:
Vysor
Vysor is my go-to tool for screen sharing of physical devices. It allows you to plug in your device to your laptop and mirror the screen as well as allowing control of the device. A must have for working remotely.
Chucker
Chucker is an on-device network interceptor. It monitors network calls you make and displays them in an easy-to-use interface that can be copied and shared from your device.
I love this tool because it runs on device, logs all network requests and keeps a history of the requests and responses that your app made. It has helped me pick up weird inconsistencies in my apps, with easy to spot duplicate requests or strange authorisation errors.
https://github.com/ChuckerTeam/chucker
Stetho
Stetho is a tool that connects to Chrome Developer Tools and gives access to a bunch of app information, as if it were a webpage you were debugging. You can get access to on-device databases, update SharedPreferences and monitor network requests and responses.
https://github.com/facebook/stetho
LeakCanary
LeakCanary helps you pick up any memory leaks that you may have in your applications. It does some pretty complex magic to analyse heaps and helps narrow down the cause of your memory leaks.
https://github.com/square/leakcanary
Shape Shifter
ShapeShifter is my favourite tool for creating AnimatedVectorDrawable animations. It takes the guesswork away from creating cute animations, helps fix paths and generate all the required XML for creating an AVD. If you want to see a quick overview of how to use it, check out my talk on animations here.
Charles Proxy
Charles Proxy is a tool for network debugging. It allows you to intercept network requests and change the response or requests. Charles Proxy is a great tool for testing error conditions or just recording what your app is doing.
Accessibility Scanner
Accessibility Scanner is an Android app that scans through your apps UI and makes accessibility recommendations based on the content of your screen. It lets you know what your app is missing in terms of content descriptions, if your colors don’t contrast well enough or the tap targets are too small. It is a great tool for improving your apps accessibility.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.accessibility.auditor&hl=en_ZA
Window VQA
Window VQA (Visual Quality Assurance) is an app for measuring views on screen. It provides a useful overlay on top of your app which allows you to click on the views and get the measurements of them in px or dp.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dziemia.w.window
Screen Recorder
Say no more, every Android Developer needs a screen recording app. This one is my favourite because there are no ads and it is super easy to use.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kimcy929.screenrecorder
Dev Tiles
DevTiles is an app that allows you to easily access some developer options right from your devices shortcuts/tiles. Options include a tile for showing touches, enabling/disabling demo mode, toggling animator durations etc.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.mustafaali.devqstiles
All these tools have helped me and made my workflow easier. What are your favourite tools that help you build Android Apps? Let me know your thoughts on Twitter.