Articles & Tutorials

Facebook shares some of their efforts to optimize Java bytecode for Android through a project called Redex, which is a pipeline for optimizing Android .dex files.

These slides will show how to make your app scalable, your code clean, your performance optimized and your UI neat in a pragmatic way the pros and cons of using certain Android APIs, strategies and libraries.

James McDonald explores Android’s threading abstractions and explains why RxJava can provide a more satisfying API for expressing asynchronous operations.

Android 6.0 Marshmallow introduces a new way for users to engage with apps through the assistant (aka Now On Tap)

When it comes to notifications, you want to strike the perfect balance between standing out and not being spammy. It’s easy enough to stand out if you improve the look of your notification, use informative text, and offer actions to your users.

Lambdas are the basis to implement lots of functional features, such as collection operations. Kotlin provides an awesome set of operations that wouldn’t be possible (or really verbose) when using a language which doesn’t support lambdas.

Matthias Käppler describes in more detail what they have done to combat Android’s method limit, what things worked well and what didn’t work so well, and what you can do to improve application health with regards to size.

If you have many flavors for your builds, here's a good way to set up separate signing keys for each flavor.

In part 4 of this series, Mark Allison turns his attention to changing other aspects of the Views within layouts via Data Binding.

If your app uses Google Cloud Messaging (GCM), you will need to take into account these behaviors for users whose devices are in Doze.

Learn what the support annotations are, and why you should use them

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Design

What is material design, exactly, and does it breathe life outside of Android? How will it grow and evolve from here?

Jobs

Want to work with cutting-edge technology and a motivated, talented team? You speak Java but are not afraid of touching C++ as well? You love reactive programming? You enjoy API design and building something that is used by millions of people? Come work with us!

Libraries & Code

Explosive dust effect for views

This sample project shows how to apply MVP and Clean architecture on an Android app.

Paper is a fast NoSQL data storage for Android that lets you save/restore Java objects by using efficient Kryo serialization and handling data structure changes automatically.

News

NowSecure is releasing to the public an open source Android Vulnerability Test Suite (Android VTS)

To support the growing number of developers who are building richer apps and games on Google Play, Google is increasing the APK file size limit to 100MB from 50MB

Tools

Google has released the 1.4 update to the Android Studio stable release channel. Most of the work and enhancements for Android Studio 1.4 are under the hood, but there are a handful of new features.

Videos & Podcasts

NotificationCompat gives you a single API for building notifications for your Android app, including support for Android Wear and Android Auto extensions

Nick Butcher explains Android’s runtime permission model and the right way to ask users for permissions.

Before Droidcon NYC 2015, Huyen tries to pick Jake Wharton's brain on Reactive Extensions, RxAndroid, and optimization.

Chiu-Ki chats with Yash about in-app purchase before her talk at Droidcon NYC.

In Android Studio 1.4, developers can create VectorDrawable assets either from the Material library or converted from SVG files. Moreover, for backward compatibility, all the VectorDrawable assets will be converted into PNG files at build time automatically.

App Links is a new feature of Android Marshmallow that brings a faster way of opening website links for domains that you own. Learn from Wojtek Kaliciński how to verify ownership of your site and get rid of the disambiguation dialog for users who install your app.

Dan Bornstein, the man behind Android's Dalvik VM, kindly stopped by the SF Android User Group to hangout and field questions from the audience.

Books

In this FREE O’Reilly e-book, mobile software engineer Matt Dupree introduces you to RxJava basics and then uses a real-world scenario to demonstrate how this library makes quick work of tasks that can often become messy and inflexible.