Category: android
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Android Architecture Components – Looking at Room and LiveData – Part 1
This week at Google I/O 2017, there were a lot of new announcements for the Android Platform. One of the announcements was the new architecture guidelines for Android! This is a welcome addition to the Android platform. Previously the Android team refrained from giving advice as to how you should structure your Android applications. For…
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Speaking at the App Builders Conference in Switzerland – 2017
Speaking at App Builders Switzerland this past week on Android Things was an invaluable experience, I had such a fantastic time. Besides the conference, I got to do a bit of sightseeing. I was able to take a day to explore Zermatt and experience a lot of snow! Unfortunately the Matterhorn wasn’t visible but this…
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Electricity Monitoring App – Send Push Notifications using Firebase Cloud Functions
This week Firebase launched a new and VERY exciting feature called Firebase Cloud Functions. It makes Firebase even more powerful than before, by allowing you to trigger functions when certain events happen. Events can be any of the following things: Data changes on Firebase Realtime database nodes. Authentication Changes Analytics Changes Cloud Storage Changes and…
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Android Things – Electricity Monitoring App
For those who may not know, I live in beautiful sunny South Africa (see my tweets for lots of awesome pictures). A few years ago we battled with a lack of electricity. While “load-shedding” is not so common these days, we have numerous unplanned outages. We even have a few of apps that give out schedules when the…
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Android Things – Building a Distributed Piano with Nearby Connections API
In the previous post, we had a short introduction to some hardware basics for the Software Engineer. We learnt about some different components and how to create a blinking LED with Android Things. In this blog post, we will learn to build a distributed piano with Android Things, a Piezo Speaker and Google’s Nearby API. I made a…
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Android Things – Hardware Basics for the Software Engineer
Android Things is the new kid on the block. It is Google’s embedded platform designed specifically for use with low-powered, IoT (Internet of Things) devices. The Android Things dev preview is available for a few different IoT boards, such as the Raspberry Pi 3, the Intel® Edison and the NXP Pico i.MX6UL.
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How to Stage Rollout Features using Firebase Remote Config (Android & iOS)
The Google Play Store has a great feature called “Staged Rollout“. It allows you to slowly release your app to a percentage of your user base. This feature is not available on the iTunes App Store. Using Firebase Remote Config, we can do much more than just stage rollout an entire app – we can stage…
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A/B Test your App using Firebase Remote Config
Last week I was in Nairobi and Cape Town giving a talk on Remote Config and Test Lab in Firebase. I had such a great time and thought I should share some of the content I presented online. What is A/B Testing? A/B testing is the process of experimentally testing your UI on different audiences in order to…
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Introduction to Automated Android Testing – Part 6
In the previous 5 blog posts, we covered different aspects of building an Android app from scratch. We focused on including tests in the process. Here are the links to the previous posts: Post #1 – Why should we write tests? Post #2 – Set up your app for testing Post #3 – Creating API…
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Introduction to Automated Android Testing – Part 5
In this series of blog posts, we are working through a sample app called Github User Search. Parts 1 – 4 covered why we should test, getting set up with testing, creating API calls and creating a presenter. Take a look at the previous posts as part 5 is a continuation of the series. In part…