Introducing adb-enhanced: A swiss army knife for Android development

Android development requires tons of disconnected approaches for development and testing. Consider some scenarios To test runtime permission - Go to Settings -> Applications -> Application info of the app you are looking for and disable that permission. To test a fresh install - adb shell pm clear-data com.example To test your app under the battery-saver mode - turn on the battery saver mode by expanding the notification bar To stop the execution of an app - kill it via activity manager, adb shell am kill com....

Swift, Kotlin, and Go

It is impressive to see the amount of similarity which exists in Swift, Kotlin and Go, the three new languages for iOS, Android, and server-development respectively. Consider a simple, Hello World program. Swift Swift 1 2 3 4 5 func printHello() { // Type automatically inferred to string let name = "Ashish" // let declares a read-only variable print("Hello world from \(name)!") } Kotlin Kotlin 1 2 3 4 5 fun printHello() { // Type automatically inferred to string val name = "Ashish" // val declares a read-only value, var declares a read-write variable println("Hello world from ${name}") } Go...

June 20, 2018 Â· 1 min      Tech

Server vs mobile development: Where the code runs matter

When the code runs on your servers, you have much more control over the “context” in which it runs. On the mobile devices, the device OS and the user control the context. This difference leads to some subtle implications. One significant set of differences comes from the lack of control of the platform. For server-side code, one can choose from a wide array of languages. For the mobile code, however, the best choice would almost always be the one dictated by the platform - Java/Kotlin on Android and Objective-C/Swift on iOS....

Google I/O 2018: Android Notes

Highlights All android support library code is moving to the androidx namespace. No more android.support.v4 or android. support.v7 namespaces. Android app bundle to split the app into downloadable modules Navigation library to set up navigation between different activities/fragments. Use WorkManager for background work - this is an improvement to JobScheduler Major improvements to Android Studio. Most standalone tools were deprecated in favor of adding the same functionality into Android Studio. Major improvements to Android Vitals which in Google Play to learn more about what’s going on with the Android app’s performance....

Diagnosing Mac apps which won't open (error -10810)

Occasionally, my mac applications end up in a corrupt state where they won’t open. I recently encountered this with Deluge. The first step to diagnose is to open Terminal and open them in the terminal via Sh 1 2 $ open -a deluge # This name is same as the name of the app (minus the ".app" portion). LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed for the application /usr/local/Caskroom/deluge/1.3.12/Deluge.app with error -10810. Now, the error is more diagnosable but still cryptic....

Google I/O 2017: Android Notes

Infrastructure - Architecture & Performance Android Vitals - More visibility in Google Play dev console on battery drain, wakelocks being held for too long, ANRs, crashes, dropped frames, and frozen frames. Architecture components - better handling of the lifecycle, Room (ORM for Sqlite), live data observers. The API looks clunky though. Performance 50% 1-star reviews mention stability & bugs. 60% 5-star reviews mention speed, design, or reliability. Apps with > 5% crash rate have 30% higher uninstall rate....

Apple vs Google: Naming of flagship Android vs iPhone

iPhone iPhone iPhone 3G -> iPhone 3GS iPhone 4 -> iPhone 4S iPhone 5 -> iPhone 5S iPhone 6 -> iPhone 6S (and plus sizes) iPhone 7 (and plus sizes) Android Nexus One Nexus S Galaxy Nexus Nexus 4 Nexus 5 Nexus 6 Nexus 5X & Nexus 6P Pixel & Pixel XL While iPhone is recognized as a global name while erstwhile Nexus and now, Pixel has almost no branding outside of the Android fanboys....

Consumer Internet: why audio can't be as big as text, photos, and videos

Our brain loves distractions, and multi-tasking gets bored quickly. When we read text or watch a photo, it engages us visually, a video (with audio) engages us even more. The bandwidth of eyes is much larger than the bandwidth of our ears. When we are watching something, it utilizes more bandwidth and hence occupies more of our attention span. Also, given the way our eyes work, we can focus more on the exciting aspect of the visual feed....

When aggregation works and when it doesn't

All consumer internet products are either about consumption, production or both. A blog site is primarily about consumption. A photo transforming app is primarily about production. Social networks are consumption heavy. Good Messaging apps are symmetric. And a grievance collection product like BBB is production heavy. Building aggregation on top of similar products is a well-known strategy. The hard realization to note is that it can succeed only in very specific scenarios....

Application Not Responding (ANR)

Demystifying Android rendering: Jank and ANR

Almost everyone developing an Android app has seen something like this in their device logs. Default 1 I/Choreographer(1200): Skipped 60 frames! The application may be doing too much work on its main thread. On most devices, the Android platform tries to render a new frame every 16 milliseconds (60 fps). The rendering requires that whatever work is happening on the UI thread should finish in that timeframe (well, actually in less than that)....