Articles & Tutorials

Joe Birch takes a deep dive into some great new additions to the notifications API and how we can implement them into our Android applications.

This article demonstrates a great way to create an abstraction over your local SQLite data storage.

Ian Lake shares 5 tips that will help prepare your app for multi-window with the release of Android N.

This week’s protip is about how to use a little known feature of JetBrains’ IDEs to minimize the back and forth between tasks and associated branches. In the IDE you can use the Tasks & Contexts menu to define tasks and switch between them.

Pawel Urban introduces RxAn­droid­Ble, the painkiller for An­droid's Blue­tooth Low En­ergy headaches. It is backed with Rx­Java, it ba­si­cally im­ple­ments com­pli­cated APIs as handy re­ac­tive ob­serv­ables.

In case if your screens consist of big amount of layouts, drawables, dimensions — it make sense to create separate resource folder for every screen.

Value types in Java are hard. Well, not hard, but tedious. Google’s AutoValue library makes them much easier and has just received the long awaited update that adds the flexibility of extensions.

Many developers are quite optimistic about Kotlin future for Android.But not everyone is ready to take a risk and start writing production code using new programming language. But what if we’ll use Kotlin only for tests?

In the next few releases (1.0.X) JetBrains will continue improving their toolchain and libraries. Their current efforts are focused on three main areas: speeding up the development workflow, reducing the size of the runtime library and providing more complete tooling support.

Mark Allison starts a new series about creating the watch face he released for April 1st. He will examine the 3 parts: the app which runs on the Wear device; the companion app which runs on the phone; and a common library which will contain some shared code & resources.

In this article Pavel Dudka gathers his thoughts and concerns regarding the new Jack & Jill Android toolchain.

Hannes Dorfmann thinks that Presenters don’t need lifecycle callback methods and in this blog post he discusses why.

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Design

Well-designed animations make the experience feel crafted. In a human-centered design approach, where the user is the prime focus, animation actually creates a feeling of well-being once it’s discovered by users.

Jobs

Changing the world is all in a day's work at Apple. If you love innovation, here's your chance to make a career of it. You'll work hard. But the job comes with more than a few perks. Apple has a world-class reputation for product quality and we need your help to keep those high standards in our Android Applications.

Changing the world is all in a day's work at Apple. If you love innovation, here's your chance to make a career of it. You'll work hard. But the job comes with more than a few perks. Imagine what you could do at Apple, where great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly.

Khan Academy is on a mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. See the impact you can make at http://khan.co/ka_stories and come help build apps to deliver free high-quality learning content using the latest Android technologies (RxJava, Dagger, Retrofit, etc)

Yelp connects consumers with great local businesses all across the world. We’re looking for Android developers of all levels who love creating delightful user experiences for millions of people and thrive in taking ownership of the product they work on.

Libraries & Code

Android Architecture Blueprints is meant to demonstrate possible ways to help with common application development problems. In this project Google offers the same application implemented using different architectural concepts and tools.

RxAndroidBle is a powerful painkiller for Android's Bluetooth Low Energy headaches. It is backed by RxJava, implementing complicated APIs as handy reactive observables.

The AboutLibraries library allows you to easily create an used open source libraries fragment/activity within your app. As an extra feature you can also add an about this app section.

Xtendroid is a DSL (domain-specific language) for Android that reduces boilerplate code while providing tooling support. Xtendroid supports both Eclipse and IntelliJ/Android Studio, including code completion, debugging, and so on.

Videos & Podcasts

Chet Haase and Romain Guy Droidcon SF 2016 keynote

In this episode the team talks Gradle with the amazing and awesome Annyce Davis. We deal with the basics of Android’s build system and dabble with some tips on improving your build times.

Finally, an Android Dialogs episode about... Dialogs! Lisa Neigut tells us how she use Dialogs to focus text input, and two awesome tricks to position your Dialog as an overlay.

In this episode, Tor and Chet* talk with Zak Cohen from the Android Wear team in London about his work on watch faces, graphics, and many other Android projects he's been involved with

RxJava is a powerful framework, but there are a lot of common issues developers run into when getting started with it. Dan Lew goes over a bunch of common mistakes and best practices when it comes to working with RxJava.