Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash Android Studio 4.0 was released today, May 28, 2020, into the stable channel. That means it’s available for anyone to download and use, without major problems. This is a major release since Android Studio 3.6, which I also reviewed back then. You can take a look at the official documentation if you want to know every detail, but the...
With the help of Gradle and the Android plugin, you can easily automate processes that in the past needed to be manually done and a lot of time-consuming activities. Among the advantages of these configurations, we find Android Gradle Build Configuration, with which you can get different versions of your app with variations for things like testing, using different backend endpoints, switching...
It has been three years since Kotlin was introduced to the Android world. Like many other programming languages, annotations are a needed and powerful tool, but surprisingly Kotlin was not compatible with Java’s Annotation Processing Tools. So let’s dive into what is KAPT for Android. When to use KAPT? The first question that usually comes to our mind when talking about annotation processing in...
When building Android apps, you’ll be facing a myriad of different file formats and terminology. Particularly when exporting the final version of your app, you’ll be seeing two main output formats. In this article, we’ll compare Android App Bundle versus APK, which are composed of DEX files. But what do all these acronyms mean? Acronym meaning Before digging deeper into the topics, it’s important...
Photo by Pathum Danthanarayana on Unsplash Firebase Firestore and Android Architecture components seem to fit together perfectly. Yet there is little information on how to tie these tools together. This was brought to my attention by Ashton Jones and in response, I’ve created some articles explaining how to integrate them. In this article, I will explain how to integrate...
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash. In a previous article, we discussed how to create an Android app with two of the most important building blocks of Android Architecture Components: LiveData and ViewModel. This is a follow-up to that tutorial. Once we have an app with clean architecture, we will be configuring Firebase Firestore for Android Architecture Components to update...
Photo by Anders Jildén on Unsplash. Among the wide range of tools that were released with Android Jetpack, Android Architecture Components, LiveData, and ViewModel are particularly useful. I’m creating this tutorial in response to Ashton Jones, who expressed that there are very few examples for integrating these Architecture Components with Google Firestore. In this...
As part of Material Design Guidelines, Android added help for developers and designers to improve accessibility in Android apps. The topic of accessibility has become very important in web apps, this because indexing in search engines is improved when apps follow accessibility best practices. As this has not been enforced in mobile applications so much, we often forget it is key for inclusion and...
Gradle has been the official Android build tool for quite some time now. It was introduced alongside Android Studio. Before the Android Gradle plugin, Android apps were built in Eclipse with ANT, another build tool. But even though it’s one of our basic everyday tools as Android developers, sometimes we don’t know what is behind it. Let’s learn what is behind this powerful tool. Photo by Bia...
