Tag: development
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Android Accessibility – Making your app Switch Access Compatible
I received an email a few days ago, where I had a request for the Book Dash Android app to support “Switch Access”. To be honest, I had no idea what this email meant. My first thought was, “Hey, this will never run on a Nintendo Switch” but I realised that this probably wasn’t what…
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Understanding Battery Usage in your Android App
Developing an android app can be a difficult and daunting task. There is so much to think about and a lot of the time battery usage is not very high on the list of things to remember. However, it is one of the most important things you need to consider. If your app is draining your user’s…
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Optimizing Layouts in Android – Reducing Overdraw
You have a great idea and you have launched your application into the wild. Now you hear people complaining how your app is slow and horrible to use. Sad face. One such step to improve the rendering time of your application is to have a look at the GPU Overdraw tool.
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Fixing Memory Leaks in Android – OutOfMemoryError
Memory leaks in Android are quite easy to create. The unsuspecting developer might be making a few memory leaks every days without realising. You probably haven’t noticed them yet or even know that they exist. Until you see an exception like this….
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Android SQLite Database – How to use onUpgrade() correctly
After reading this blog post (and a few others) on how to use the onUpgrade() method for your Android SQLite Database, I thought I should share my experience about how to correctly upgrade your database. It will also be beneficial to highlight why the final solution listed in that blog post would also fail at some point for some scenarios.…
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App Invites in Android – Using Google Services
By leveraging the power of Google Services, we can easily send invites to our friends to start using an app we really like. No need to implement custom solutions as this takes care of the typical use case for getting more people into your app. Best of all? It is really simple to implement!
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Monthly Android Morsels [November 2015]
Just a small list of things related to Android development that I have found useful this month. Hope you find them useful too! Android Design: A nice new way to edit your theme and see its effect in Android Studio. Click Tools -> Android -> Theme Editor Android XML optimisation: Tired of creating dummy text…
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Android – Reduce the size of your APK files
If it is one thing that I hate – it is apps that are HUGE downloads for really simplistic functionality. 40MB for an app that just accesses some messages and has hardly any images, what is it doing?? I have recently had quite an obsession trying to reduce my app size and have managed to shave off…
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Using Git Flow for Android Development
Developing in a small team is pretty manageable as you generally see the code that is changing and can easily monitor these changes. Often teams don’t take full advantage of Git’s capabilities.
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Android Data Binding – Part 2
In Part 1 I gave an introduction into the Android Data Binding Library. I suggest reading that post first before reading further. In this post I am going to discuss the following : Binding Adapters Binding Events Two Way Binding Binding Adapters Creating an adapter and using Android Data Binding for each item is quite simple.…