TL;DR version If you can’t find a library (Maven dependency) you need for your project after Bintray/JCenter (or another similar service) shutdown, but you still have it in your local Gradle cache, you can easily set up your own local Maven repository with that library as a replacement and keep the files for as long…
A few years ago Adam outlined 8 steps to keep your API sane in his blog post which I really recommend if you haven’t seen it yet. The second step there, “be liberal in what the app accepts”, is quite a specific one because it is applicable not only to the backend side of the…
I’ve recently come across a weird and totally unexpected issue while developing an Android app. I bet a lot of people may have enough luck to never notice it but if it finally happens to you and crashes your app, it’s quite hard to pinpoint the cause of the issue quickly if you don’t know…
In one of my previous posts I have described how to implement a ViewModel factory that was able to provide ViewModels with their dependencies injected, e.g. an API client, and it was good enough for me at that time. Later on, thanks to Piotr, we’ve found out even better and simpler approach with an additional…
People who start their professional coding adventure, whether they are still studying, just graduated or changing profession, may often hesitate what programming platform they should start with. So let me mention a few reasons why I think it’s a great idea to start with Android. Platform availability Contrary to many other platforms (including iOS), you…
Kotlin language provides a nice and clean way to handle nullable variables in code so that it is less error prone. Unless you do it all wrong, of course. lateinit modifier Normally, all non-nullable properties in Kotlin classes must be properly initialized. You can do it in several ways: in primary constructor, in initializer block(s),…
Android resolves language- and culture-specific resources based on the system locale setting. This is a desired behavior that makes perfect sense. Despite it’s officially not encouraged you may still need to write an app that allows the user to change its language without leaving it. In this article I will show you one of the…
Since Kotlin becomes more and more popular, especially amongst Android developers (and it’s officially supported by Google), some people decided to compare its runtime performance with Java. After reading a few articles I wanted to test it myself and now I’m ready to share some of my observations and experiences. What is it about? Microbenchmarking…
What are they? Android Manifest placeholders allow you to put variables into the Manifest that is otherwise completely static. Why would you need such functionality? Actually, it depends on your projects. It’s probably most useful when you have multiple build variants with different Manifest configurations. Multiple Manifests Of course, the easiest way to configure Manifest…
In my previous post I described how to implement injectable Android view models using Dagger and ViewModel library from Android Architecture Components. In this post I will show a simple way to unit test the view model created then. You can find the full code in the same repository as previously on GitHub. The structure…
