Android Weekly - Android Weekly #663 🤖

View in web browser

663

February 23rd, 2025

Articles & Tutorials

Sponsored

How Koin's Plugin Helps You Spot Kotlin App Issues

Join Arnaud & Miguel for a technical webinar exploring the new Koin Plugin for IntelliJ & Android Studio. Learn how it detects dependency issues directly in your IDE, highlights potential app issues, and integrates with the Kotzilla Console for advanced debugging and root-cause analysis.

Gradle Plugins Best Practices

Tim Malseed recommends centralizing Gradle plugin declarations in the top-level build.gradle to ensure consistency and avoid dependency issues in multi-module projects.

Static App Shortcuts in Android: A Simple Implementation Guide

Eknath Dhuri provides a step-by-step guide to implementing static app shortcuts, enhancing user experience by allowing quick access to key features directly from the app icon.

Beware of READ_MEDIA_IMAGES: not just a feeling of rejection

Alejandra Stamato highlights issues with the READ_MEDIA_IMAGES permission in Android, explaining how its inclusion in the manifest can block deployment to the Alpha channel.

Kotlin Guards Explained: Boost Code Clarity with when Statements

Ioannis Anifantakis introduces Kotlin Guards, an experimental feature in Kotlin 2.1 that enhances the when statement by allowing additional condition checks directly within each branch.

Handling Token Expiration in Retrofit: Automatic Token Refresh with OkHttp

Dobri Kostadinov provides a comprehensive guide on managing token expiration in Retrofit by utilizing OkHttp’s Authenticator to automatically refresh tokens.

Reliable Timekeeping with the TrustedTime API in Android

Ignacio Carrión discusses the TrustedTime API, which provides Android developers with a reliable and tamper-resistant time source, independent of device settings, enhancing functionalities like scheduling and security.

Unit Testing ViewModels

Marcello Galhardo introduces ViewModelScenario, a helper in Lifecycle 2.9.0-alpha01 that simplifies unit testing of ViewModels by facilitating the testing of onCleared() and state restoration.

Deprecating idling resource libraries

Jake Wharton announces the deprecation of two idling condition testing libraries, expressing concerns that idling resources expose application internals to testing frameworks, leading to brittle tests.

How I prototype with colors in Jetpack Compose

Sina Samaki shares strategies for efficient color prototyping in Jetpack Compose, implementing a dark-light color chooser using an infix extension function, and utilizing Android Studio’s preview feature for rapid iteration.

Place a sponsored post

Advertise your Android dev course to over 80k readers

We reach out to more than 80k Android developers around the world, every week, through our email newsletter and social media channels. Advertise your Android development course!

Libraries & Code

LuckyWheelViewCompose

A custom lightweight component that displays a Lucky Wheel developed with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Features easy customize of colors, text, icon, arrow, animation, rotation and addition of items and it's very easy to integrate in your application.

News

OpenAI vs. DeepSeek: Which AI Understands Kotlin Better?

Vera Kudrevskaia evaluates AI models’ proficiency with Kotlin, revealing that DeepSeek-R1 outperforms OpenAI’s latest models, including o1 and o3-mini, in understanding and generating Kotlin code

Videos & Podcasts

Request And Display User's Current Location

Daniel Atitienei shows how to request user location permissions and retrieve their current location.

3 Ways How Attackers Can Reverse Engineer Your Android App

Philipp Lackner's deep dive into different approaches to reverse engineering on Android to better understand how an attacker could get to secrets in your app - and finally to understand how we can protect against that.

Data Oriented Programming

Dive into the programming paradigm of Data Oriented Programming (DOP) and why making data the star can simplify your code.

What Are The Different Kinds of Test Doubles

Jov Mit explains the different kinds of test doubles.

Community has spoken! Android Studio is the Winner 🏆

Community has spoken! Android Studio is the winner and Fleet loses out.

Compose for TV | Jetpack Compose Tips

Compose for TV is the modern approach for building Android TV user interfaces

Building KMP Libraries: The RevenueCat Story

Sebastian and Márton discuss building KMP libraries with Jay Shortway, the author of RevenueCat’s Kotlin Multiplatform SDK for in-app purchases.

Kotlin Multi Platform RSS Feeds parser: Debugging Madness

Code With The Italians, where they dive into the wild world of RSS feeds and environment variables with special guest Marco Gomiero!