Android and other

What Is Android Credential Manager? Android Credential Manager is the new unified authentication framework that replaces the aging SmartLock and Autofill APIs. If you’ve been relying on those legacy systems, now’s the time to migrate. Credential Manager gives your users a modern, secure way to authenticate — and it’s simpler for you to implement than you might think. Here’s the core idea: instead…

What Is MediaPipe LLM Inference? If you’re building an Android app that needs to run large language models (LLMs) on-device, MediaPipe LLM Inference API is one of the most accessible ways to get there. It handles model loading, quantisation, and hardware acceleration so you can focus on the experience — no cloud dependency, no server bills, no data leaving the device. You might wonder how this…

What Is the Predictive Back Gesture? Android 13 introduced the predictive back gesture — a system-wide feature that lets users preview their navigation destination by long-pressing the back button before fully committing to the action. It’s a powerful UX improvement that gives users confidence in their navigation choices, but it requires your app to handle the back gesture differently than ever…

The Stack Trace Triage Problem Every app that ships crashes. Users hit unexpected states, device configurations trigger edge cases, third-party libraries fail in mysterious ways. When a crash report lands in Firebase Crashlytics, you’re looking at a stack trace, maybe some breadcrumbs or custom logs, and you need to decide: Is this a high-priority bug? Can I reproduce it? How do I even start…

Why Your App Feels Slow on First Launch You’ve optimized your layouts, trimmed your dependency graph, and profiled your Compose recompositions. Yet users still report that your app feels sluggish the first time they open it after install or update. The culprit is usually JIT compilation — the Android Runtime compiles your app’s bytecode to native code on the fly, and those first few seconds pay…

From Shared Logic to Shared UI If you’ve been following the Kotlin Multiplatform story, you’ve probably already shared networking with Ktor in a KMP shared module and persistence with SQLDelight across platforms. The next logical question is: can you share the UI too? With Compose Multiplatform, the answer in 2026 is a confident yes. JetBrains’ Compose Multiplatform builds on top of Jetpack…

Why Unstructured AI Coding Fails for Android Projects You open your AI coding agent, type “add a settings screen with dark mode toggle,” and the agent immediately starts writing code. Three minutes later, it’s generated a SettingsActivity with XML layouts — except your app uses single-activity Compose navigation. It didn’t check your architecture. It didn’t ask about your theming approach. It…

Why On-Device AI Matters for Android Developers Every AI feature you ship today probably depends on a network call. The user types something, your app hits an API, waits for a response, and displays the result. It works, but it comes with latency, server costs, and the uncomfortable fact that your app is useless without a connection. Gemini Nano changes that equation entirely. Gemini Nano is…

The Gap That Claude Code Fills in Code Review Code review is one of the most valuable things a team does — and one of the most time-consuming. Reviewers catch real bugs, but they also spend energy on things that could be automated: spotting forgotten null checks, flagging coroutine scope misuse, noticing that a ViewModel leaks a reference to Context. Claude Code can handle that category of…

What Are Kotlin Contracts? If you’ve worked with Kotlin for a while, you’ve likely encountered functions from the standard library that seem to have almost magical powers. Take require() and check()—call them with a condition, and the compiler somehow knows that if execution continues past that line, your variable is no longer nullable. Or use isNullOrEmpty() on a string, and suddenly the…

A Pattern I Noticed Over Time Every now and then I watch a YouTube live stream. Not regularly — maybe a few times a month when I’m in the mood and someone I follow happens to be live. Could be a coding session, a Q&A, a product launch, whatever. I enjoy the format. There’s something nice about watching someone work or talk in real time while a little community forms in the chat beside them. And…

What Is the WallpaperColors API? Android 8.1 (API 27) introduced the WallpaperColors API, and it remains one of the most underrated tools for building personalized Android experiences. It lets you extract the dominant, secondary, and tertiary colors from your user’s system wallpaper and apply them to your app’s theme in real time. On Android 12+ (API 31), Google took this further with Material…

The Problem: Primitive Obsession You’ve probably seen this pattern in production code: database IDs represented as Long, user emails as String, currency amounts as Double. On the surface, it’s simple and pragmatic. But it introduces a subtle bug vector—primitive obsession. Imagine you have a function that accepts a user ID and a post ID, both as Long: fun deletePost(userId: Long, postId: Long)…

Why Android Keyboard Animation Matters When your app shows a text input and the soft keyboard slides up, that moment sets the tone for user experience. A jarring jump or a laggy animation feels cheap. A smooth, synchronized transition where your content slides up in perfect sync with the IME (Input Method Editor) feels polished and intentional. The WindowInsetsAnimation API is Android’s tool for…

What Is the Choreographer API? The Choreographer API is Android’s internal frame timing system — the heartbeat of smooth animation. Every frame your app draws, the Choreographer orchestrates the timing. It synchronizes with the device’s VSYNC signal (the vertical refresh of your screen), and it exposes a callback mechanism so you can hook into that same frame timing for custom animations, game…

LLM Prompts for Code Refactoring: Structuring Your Requests When you’re facing a large refactoring task in your Android codebase, asking an LLM the right way can save you hours. Unlike simple coding questions, refactoring requires your AI assistant to understand the architectural context, the business logic you’re preserving, and the specific constraints of your project. In this post, you’ll…

Generate Architecture Documentation Automatically from Your Codebase You know the problem: your app’s architecture documentation is either non-existent, wildly out of date, or buried in scattered wiki pages that nobody reads. By the time you onboard a new developer, they’re confused about module boundaries, data flow, and how components talk to each other. Modern LLMs can solve this. With the…