Got this from a recruiter:

We are looking for a **Senior Android Developer/Lead** at Philadelphia PA

Hiring Mode: Contract

Must have skills:

· 10-12 years mobile experience in developing Android applications
· Solid understanding of Android SDK on frameworks such as: UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation, Network Programming, etc.
· Good Knowledge on REST Ful API and JSON Parsing
· Good knowledge on multi-threaded environment and grand central dispatch
· Advanced object-oriented programming and knowledge of design patterns
· Ability to write clean, well-documented, object-oriented code
· Ability to work independently
· Experience with Agile Driven Development
· Up to date with the latest mobile technology and development trends
· Passion for software development- embracing every challenge with a drive to solve it
· Engaging communication skills

My response:

I am terribly sorry but I am completely not interested in working for anyone who might think that this is a job description for an Android engineer.

1. Android was released in September 2008 so finding anyone with 10 years experience now would have to be a Google engineer.
2. UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation are all iOS frameworks
3. Grand Central Dispatch is an iOS mechanism for multithreading and is not in Android
4. There are JSON parsing frameworks, no one does that by hand anymore

Please delete me from your emailing list.

Google removed support for an api and made it paid.

Hold_on.jpg, i used this a while ago

Boots up android studio, the api key is there

Tries service with old api key

Works

:^)

So, you start with a PHP website.

Nah, no hating on PHP here, this is not about language design or performance or strict type systems...

This is about architecture.

No backend web framework, just "plain PHP".

Well, I can deal with that. As long as there is some consistency, I wouldn't even mind maintaining a PHP4 site with Y2K-era HTML4 and zero Javascript.

That sounds like fucking paradise to me right now. 😍

But no, of course it was updated to PHP7, using Laravel, and a main.js file was created. GREAT.... right? Yes. Sure. Totally cool. Gotta stay with the times. But there's still remnants of that ancient framework-less website underneath. So we enter an era of Laravel + Blade templates, with a little sprinkle of raw imported PHP files here and there.

Fine. Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css. Whatever. I can still handle this. 🤨

But then the Frontend hipsters swoosh back their shawls, sip from their caramel lattes, and start whining: "We want React! We want SPA! No more BootstrapCSS, we're going to launch our own suite of SASS styles! IT'S BETTER".

OK, so we create REST endpoints, and the little monkeys who spend their time animating spinners to cover up all the XHR fuckups are satisfied. But they only care about the top most visited pages, so we ALSO need to keep our Blade templated HTML. We now have about 200 SPA/REST routes, and about 350 classic PHP/Blade pages.

So we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA 😑

Now the Backend grizzlies wake from their hibernation, growling: We have nearly 25 million lines of PHP! Monoliths are evil! Did you know Netflix uses microservices? If we break everything into tiny chunks of code, all our problems will be solved! Let's use DDD! Let's use messaging pipelines! Let's use caching! Let's use big data! Let's use search indexes!... Good right? Sure. Whatever.

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Cassandra + Elastic 😫

Our monolith starts pooping out little microservices. Some polished pieces turn into pretty little gems... but the obese monolith keeps swelling as well, while simultaneously pooping out more and more little ugly turds at an ever faster rate.

Management rushes in: "Forget about frontend and microservices! We need a desktop app! We need mobile apps! I read in a magazine that the era of the web is over!"

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + GraphQL + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Google pub/sub + Neo4J + Cassandra + Elastic + UWP + Android + iOS 😠

"Do you have a monolith or microservices" -- "Yes"

"Which database do you use" -- "Yes"

"Which API standard do you follow" -- "Yes"

"Do you use a CI/building service?" -- "Yes, 3"

"Which Laravel version do you use?" -- "Nine" -- "What, Laravel 9, that isn't even out yet?" -- "No, nine different versions, depends on the services"

"Besides PHP, do you use any Python, Ruby, NodeJS, C#, Golang, or Java?" -- "Not OR, AND. So that's a yes. And bash. Oh and Perl. Oh... and a bit of LUA I think?"

2% of pages are still served by raw, framework-less PHP.

Me and my team in middle of our first hackathon-
a girl who is our class topper is my team mate, trying to write some Android Code.

I am writing nodejs Api, she calls me saying there's a bug in my code,so for saving time I decided to fix that small thing on her laptop,so when I went to the backend folder to open the js file,I see no default text editor set for it. After searching,I found out she had no atom,sublime,vs etc.
I asked her - "Do you even have notepad++ ?".
She - "I have notepad,but not ++".

That day I had to edit my code in Wordpad. I am still shaking.

Problems with Android development

1. Android Studio is shitte
2. Android API is shitte
3. Gradle is shitte
4. Emulator is shitte
5. My life is shitte

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

Boss - so how long will this transport booking app take, native android and iOS ....plus backend, plus localization, plus live location tracking, blah blah.

Me - at least 4 months, or more

Boss - HOW can an app take MONTHS? That is totally unacceptable, it’s not gonna work this way, blah blah. I’m giving u 2 months, tops. No project should take more than 2 months.

—

Next app,
Boss - so this new e-commerce app needs to be made, u have api. How long?

Me - 2 months coz ——-

Boss - WHATTTTT!!!??? 2 months for an APP!!???? What is this? Not gonna work this way, you should make apps in a week. Other people make apps in a week.

Then fucking hire those other people. Lol.

!rant

I had to stop developing hybrid android applications with Ionic and start developing native.. I was given 1 week to present an app or they would hire an external developer.. I knew nothing about Java or Android development and in 4 days I already have a working, hardware scanner integrated, API calling, camera picture taking,.. Application! My brain hurts and I'm feeling like a zombie, but hey.. I'm proud of myself! :D

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Oh God NO! Please tell me it is not normal for an Android app cumminacating with a rest API to send my login credentials in a fucking GET request!

First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:

So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.

Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.

Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.

For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.

Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.

Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.

I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?

Hey guys, first rant,

At the moment I'm developing a very big and complex app. We are almost done and decided to deliver a test version to our customer. After he received our test he called us and said there is a problem with a function, he just said it's not working and wasn't very specific.

So I decided to check his problem, because an colleague couldn't figure it out.
I started the app via android studio and had a similar problem, there was a huge delay at the automatic recording function of Bluetooth messages, I thought yeah this is his problem.
I showed it my colleague and he said that he doesn't have this problem, we have different Bluetooth simulators so we thought that there must be a problem with the Bluetooth communication or the simulators are broken.
I checked if there is some kind of timing or buffer problem and logged the shit out of the simulator and found nothing, 3 hours were lost🏁.

My colleague checked his last changes because he had changed a lot at the App Api do to new conditions and those customer wishes💀 he couldn't found anything. So we thought maybe it's my device and the device of the customer. We switched the devices and tada no problem with my devices if the app is builded at the pc of my colleague.

I thought ok maybe it's because I turned some ndk features off. Turned it back on, nothing happened. So we exchanged our Android Studio Settings but no difference. So I said yeah whatever my mashine is just fucked. I restarted my mashine for the third time and started android fucking studio. Some little popup showed up "new updates"... the solution came to my mind ... Do to an update of android studio I excidently turned on Instant Run.....🌋 . I checked it, it was activated, these fucking instant run, great idea but not working... Turned it off, everything worked.
I called the customer because he can't have a problem and he said, this time not angry, oh yeah it was just a notification if I want to turn on my Bluetooth and I decided no and the Bluetooth recording is not recording, this is a problem... -😠NO FUCKING COMMENT😤-

The Adventures of my Project Manager.
--- Part 1

a little back story first:
-----------------------------
The project manager is the CEO's younger brother.
-----------------------
end of back story.

PM: Hey, we should stop using Nodejs on our API.
ME: Why?
PM: I don't see why it is necessary when we could make our android app talk directly with MongoDB.
.................
ME: QUE?!

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Going through Master Card API docs to see how to integrate it, saw that they have sample code, checked Java sample code and found this:

String data = MessageFormat.format(
"'{'\"apiOperation\":{0},"
+ "\"sourceOfFunds\":'{'\"type\":{1},\"provided\":'{'\"card\":'{'\"numbe\":{2},"
+ "\"expiry\":'{'\"month\":{3}, \"year\":{4}'}',\"securityCode\":{5}'}}}',"
+ "\"order\":'{'\"reference\":{6}'}',"
+ "\"transaction\":'{'\"amount\":{7},\"currency\":{8},\"reference\":{9},\"targetTransactionId\":{10}'}'," + "\"customer\":'{'\"ipAddress\":{11}'}}'",
apiOperation,
sourceOfFundsType,
cardNumber,
cardExpiryMonth,
cardExpiryYear,
cardSecurityCode,
orderReference,
transactionAmount,
transactionCurrency,
transactionReference,
targetTransactionId,
customerIpAddress );

FOR FUCK SAKE what happened to JSONObject (for Android) class, I'm sure it is a waaaay better solution than that mess ...
And from Oracle:
JsonObject value = Json.createObjectBuilder()
.add("firstName", "John")
.add("lastName", "Smith")
.add("age", 25)
.build();

I guess that is a cleaner understandable solution than what master card has.

tl;dr @Root refactors some spaghetti.

I'm refactoring an api that creates a support message. It's a post route.

When seeing a magic hardcoded message string, this route instead updates the user object, and does not create a support message.

It also returns different results if the user is muted (fine) or if saving the message succeeds or fails (fine).

But if the user is creating a duplicate message, it doesn't save the message (fine) and... redirects to listing their messages instead? Wat?

Also, when refactoring this (migrating to a new message backend), I discovered that not all routes return a response. If the message is a non-duplicate, from a non-muted player, from a non-redacted client, the route doesn't respond at all!

So, I'm having fun cleaning this up. I actually am. Except I'll need to support all of the legacy clients for the next lifetime or two. I mean, really. There are still people with Android v2 devices who are using this thing. not even kidding.

Android, you fucking cunt!

Battery saving, yes it's an important thing. So first you want applications to display a big-ass notification when they're running in the background. Fair enough, it can be hidden away by the user if they want to.

But now there's a big-ass notification and the applications STILL get force closed?!! If I'm browsing Tor and I have Orbot running, don't you think that I might want to KEEP IT RUNNING?!! Or better yet, if I'm connected to my VPN server and the application is actively using the VPNService API, DON'T YOU THINK THAT THAT SHOULDN'T BE CLOSED?!!!

But yeah, ARTIFICIAL FUCKING INTELLIGENCE is doing some leety-ass fucking battery saving. MY FUCKING ASS CAN DO BETTER BATTERY SAVING!!!

PM: hows the android app going?
Android Dev: gradle downloading... blocked by network admin.

PM: anyway how is the iOS app going?
iOS Dev: cocoapods downloading... blocked by network admin.

PM: ... i guess the only thing running now is the web admin right?
Laravel/VueJS Dev: composer nodejs/npm/yarn downloading... blocked by network admin.

PM: team lets retest the api endponts
Team: Postman downloading... blocked by network admin.
Team: -_- Insomnia REST Client downloading... blocked by network admin.

PM: code study?
Team: even visual studio code/android studio/xcode is blocked. :(

.... sad dev life

anyone here with the same problem?

Not a rant about anything in particular. Just a summary of some feelings stored in the hateful part of my heart.

Developing for Android: Add this third-party library to your Gradle build. Use (this) built-in Android class to make the thing work.

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version SUCKMYDICK-7. Use (this) instead

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version LICKMYBALLS-32. Use...

Developing for Windows: Please use (this) API call. It was literally already available before Bill Gates was born. Carbon dating has placed this item to older than the universe itself and it is likely the entry point for the big bang. It is also still the best way to accomplish (task).

Developing for Linux: "Hmm, I wonder how to use this"

> > > Some shitty mailing list in small blue monospace font tells you to reference a man page that is three versions behind but the only version available.

What? Those three sentences didn't explain it enough? Well, maybe you aren't cut out for this type of thing.

JavaScript: you know how it is.

SQL: You expect a decent-quality answer from stack overflow but you always get an outdated and hacky response and it's using syntax from Microsoft SQL. You need MySQL.

C#: A surprising number of Microsoft forum results ranking high on Google. You click on one in hopes that it will be of any sort of quality. You quickly close the tab and wonder why you ever even had hope.

Literally any REST API: Is it "query" or "q"? "UserID" or "user_id"? Oh, fuck, where's the docs again?

You thought you escaped JavaScript, but it was a trick!: Some bullshit library you downloaded to make your other library work redefined one of the global variables in the project you inherited. Now you get 347 "<x> is not a function" errors in your console. Good luck, asshole.

FontAwesome/ Material fonts/ Any icon font pack: You search "Close" for a close button icon. No results. You search "Simplified railroad crossing sign without the railroad". You get a close icon.

I think that's all of my pent up rage. Each of them were too small for an individual rant so I had to do this essay.

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

I had a coworker that was an Air Force pilot (99% certain he was telling the truth as I was working for a government contractor and he had security clearance so I'd be a little surprised if he fooled HR and our whole team). Thing is... He genuinely believed the earth is flat. Whenever anybody would ask "haven't you seen the curvature of the earth? Like... More than once?" He'd respond with "yes I have, what's your point?". Uh.... Okay.

Didn't help that he also was convinced cpp is the only language you ever need for any project. Like, "what if instead of building a web API and two separate native mobile app frontends (Swift/Java)... We instead build our own proprietary C++ framework that somehow runs on IOS and Android and we can also use it for our Backend instead of .Net?"

I'm not saying I love Java or Swift or that at some point I haven't thought about why we can't just use cpp in both, but you're supposed to grow out of that kind of thinking. I think every noobie or college students thinks "oh there's got to be a way". But at some point in your career you realize even if you could, it wouldn't be any easier to use and the performance gain would crazy small compared to amount of effort and you'd be playing catch up with both IOS/Android forever.

But no matter how many times we'd shoot it down, he'd keep bringing it up. And he wasn't straight out of school or something. He had like 20 years of programming experience.

I don't have a lot of memorable co-workers that were positive but honestly I think that's because usually if they're good at what they do I don't have to interact with them a bunch or spend time thinking "Jesus what am I going to have to fix next from this guy". I definitely have worked with good/great programmers, they just don't stand out as much as the shitty ones.

Frequently used answers :)

UI developer - I think API is not working
Backend developer - Front end is not sending the request correctly
Tester - Testing! Testing!
UI/UX - As per android/ios standards...
QA - Let me check one more time
PM - Let us have another meeting and get on the same page
Dev-Ops - It's very complicated you know
CTO - We're working on a next-gen solution
Founder - Let us build something that no one has built, something similar to what google...facebook...

Cridits: My EX-CPO

Why don't Android users upgrade to newer phones?
It's a pain supporting users on API level 20 and below. -_-

While trying to integrate a third-party service:

Their Android SDK accepts almost anything as a UID, even floats and doubles. Which is odd, who uses those as UIDs? I pass an Integer instead. No errors. Seems like it's working. User shows up on their dashboard.

Next let's move onto using their data import API. Plug in everything just like I did on mobile. Whoa, got an error. "UIDs must be a string". What. Uh, but the SDK accepts everything with no error. Ok fine. Change both the SDK and API to return the UID as a string. No errors returned after changing the UIDs.

Check dashboard for user via UID. Uh, properties haven't been updating. Check search properties. Find out that UIDs can only be looked up as Integers. What? Why do you ask me to send it as a string via the API then? Contact support. Find out it created two distinct records with the UID, one as a string and the other as an Integer.

GFG.

Dear Google, please notify devs before you overhaul apis in Android, I hate updating my api level and then my code won't build, this ia extremely shitty, where I have to now update random Android code because of deprecated apis, Shit Google.

Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).

I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.

From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)

You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.

sooooooooo for my current graduate class we were to use the MVC pattern to build an IOS application(they preferred it if we did an IOS application) or if you didn't have an Apple computer: an Android application.

The thing is, they specified to use Java, while in their lectures and demos they made a lot of points for other technologies, hybrid technologies, such as React Cordova, all that shit, they even mentioned React Native and more. But not one single mention of Kotlin. Last time I tried my hand at Android development was way before Kotlin, it was actually my first major development job: Mobile development, for which we used Obj C on the IOS part and well, Java on the Android part.

As some of you might now, I rarely have something bad to say about a tech stack(except for VBA which I despise, but I digress) and I love and use Java at work. But the Android API has always seem unnecessarily complex for my taste, because of that, when I was working as a mobile development I dreaded every single minute in which I had to code for Android, Google had a great way to make people despise Java through their Android API. I am not saying it is shit, I am not saying it is bad, I just-dont-like-it.

Kotlin, proves a superior choice in my humble opinion for Android development, and because the language is for retards, it was fairly easy for me to pick it up in about 2 hours. I was already redesigning some of my largest Spring applications using half the code and implemented about 80% of the application's functionality in less than 3 hours(login, fragment manipulation, permissions, bla bla) and by that time I started to wonder if the app built on Kotlin would be ok. And why not? If they specifically mentioned and demonstrated examples using Swift, then surely Kotlin would be fine no? Between Kotlin and Java it is easy to see that kotlin is more similar to Swift than Java. So I sent an email. Their response: "I am sorry, but we would much rather you stick with the official implementations for Android, which in this case is Java for the development of the application"

I was like 0.o wat? So I replied back sending links and documentation where Google touted Kotlin as the new and preferred way to develop Android applications, not as a second class citizen of the platform, but as THE preferred stack. Same response.

Eventually one of the instructors reflected long enough on it to say that it was fine if I developed the application in Kotlin, but they advised me that since they already had grading criteria for the Java program I had to redo it in Java. It did not took me long really, once I was finished with the Kotlin application I basically rewrote only a couple of things into Java.

The end result? I think that for Android I still greatly prefer Kotlin. Even though I am not the biggest fan of Kotlin for anything else, or as my preferred language in the JVM.

I just.......wish....they would have said something along the lines of: "Nah fam please rewrite that shit for Java since we don't have grading criterias in place for Kotlin, sorry bruh, 10/10 gg tho" instead of them getting into an email battle with me concerning Kotlin being or not being the language to use in Android. It made me feel that they effectively had no clue what they were talking about and as such not really capable of taking care of students on a graduate level program.

Made me feel dirty.

Damn Apple. These stupid certificates. I only want to send notifications. On Android I have to add one API key. And you Apple? Struggeling to get ionic push working for 6 hours...

Was at school the other day and met a dude who was told by an acquaintance that I'm a "computer guy".

Dude comes up to me and jokes that the acquaintance was spreading rumors about me being a programmer. I was a bit confused and tell him that I do in fact program, and then he asks me what I've done, to which I explain what languages I've dealt with.

Next thing he asks me: "Have you made an OS?"

BREH

He tells me about how he went through Linux From Scratch. I have no idea how in-depth that book goes, if someone who has read it could enlighten me that'd be nice.

Acquaintance mentions that I won an app contest. (At this point, I'm internally telling acquaintance to shut his face.) I explain what I made(an Android app that helps sort Lego pieces) and he promptly tells me that I just used an API and barely wrote any code.

After (hopefully calmly) going back and forth with him, I just say "So I write bad code. What's it matter to you?" He stopped talking right there.

He apologized later. Yeah right, I'm sure you're sorry.

I've created a small smart home web app 2 or 3 years ago.
Features:
- Change DECT heating controller settings
- Philips Hue control
- Wunderlist integration
- Send a cooking recipe to the web app (from a large recipe site, with a greasymonkey script)

I've mounted an old Android tablet to a kitchen cupboard where the web app runs in kiosk mode in fullscreen (you can swipe between the different panels).

The web app is build with .NET Core Web-API, Vue.js and MariaDB. Everything runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Last year I've discovered openHAB with HABPanel...

Working with Android DatePicker is such a pain in the ass.

You want to have your DatePicker appearing as a SpinnerView? Well, easy!

If you're under API 21, you can use the following method 'setSpinnerViewShown()'. If you're between API 21 and API 23 you need to add some style configuration. And if you're above of API 23 you can't use both of the methods above, you need to create a custom xml with the attribute "datePickerMode" (no, datePickerMode can't be set programmatically, it would be too easy to guess).

If you want to add a listener to it, you think it might be a method called 'setDateChangeListener' or something like this? Well no! You must use the 'init(year, month, day, Listener)' method, logic!

If you think you're finished with this bullshit, of course not. Their is a known bug on API 21 that you must take into account (but this bug isn't fixed, no, it's just documented somewhere on google forums).

I don't know the team that designed the DatePicker for Android, but it might a team of champanzee that randomly changed their minds to the phases of the moon!

Android development:
- read the official documentation
- implement the logic in your app using what you learned
- find out that at least one method is always deprecated
- read the updated API and, as always, check out your loyal friend Stack Overflow.

Last week's Android development time breakdown:

21.9% Managing state
17.7% Referring to lifecycle diagrams
15.1% Waiting for Gradle
8.5% Reading the official docs on how to use component x
8.4% Reordering auto-generated ConstraintLayout XML
7.5% Swearing
4.2% Googling “Stack overflow component x is deprecated”
3.9% Googling “Stack overflow implement component x on API 24 or lower”
3.7% Googling “Stack overflow implement component x on API 21 or lower”
3.2% Googling “Stack overflow implement component x on API 19 or lower”
2.9% Googling “Stack overflow callback y called twice”, realising its a feature and not a bug, swearing a lot
2.0% Checking if Flutter is mature yet
1.0% Implementing business logic

I'm working on a project that integrates your Android phone with your PC. Stuff like file transfer, sending SMS and notification sync. I just had an idea for an awesome feature. Started researching and found that the Android API exposes exactly what I need. Full of motivation I started coding until I realized that the permission I need cannot be granted to third-party apps. Happened the second time. Fml

So.....Google Flutter is finally out of beta and ready to go.

Why? Well you see, Google realized that Android development was a complete fucking mess (50+ lines of code to get a permission? Yeah eatadick) and that Fb had it right with React Native which held a better model for building interfaces and manipulating said data. Dart as a language is very nice and for those comming from C#, Java and Js should not pose that much of a hassle.

I love Java, I really do, but Google took care of making Android Java development as tedious as fucking possible with the quirky Android API. Hopefully Flutter will make it better and hopefully Fushia will become a better OS.

Remember, language extensions or frameworks happen for 2 different reasons:

1 the community loves the environment and language enough that they make more cool stuff for it (Js, Ruby, Python etc, this phenomena happens in said ecosystems)

2 the environment is so severly flawed that people add libs to fix it (or extensions to the language if we ate talking about a language)
E.g Android Butterknife, okhttp etc.

I welcome our Dart overlords.

Discovered pro tip of my life :
Never trust your code

Achievements unlocked :
Successfully running C++ GPU accelerated offscreen rendering engine with texture loading code having faulty validation bug over a year on production for more than 1.5M daily Android active users without any issues.

History : Recently I was writing a new rendering engineering that uses our GPU pipeline engine.. and our prototype android app benchmark test always fails with black rendering frame detection assertion.

Practice:
Spend more than a month to debug a GPU pipeline system based on directed acyclic graph based rendering algorithm.

New abilities added :
Able to debug OpenGL ES code on Android using print statement placed in source code using binary search.

But why?
I was aware of the issue over a month and just ignored it thinking it's a driver bug in my android device.. but when the api was used by one of Android dev, he reported the same issue. In the same day at night 2:59AM ....

Satan came to me and told me that " ok listen man, here is what I am gonna do with you today, your new code will be going production in a week, and the renderer will give you just one black frame after random time, and after today 3AM, your code will not show GL Errors if you debug or trace. Buhahahaha ahhaha haahha..... Puffff"

And he was gone..
Thanks satan for not killing me.. I will not trust stable production code anymore enevn though every line is documented and peer reviewed.

More like a sub company/department inside a company: Android.

I still use it as my main driver, but every time I try to get back into development with it(did it professionally for 2 years nearing on 3 and was a lead Android dev, mind you not necessarily by merit....) I end up hating everything about it.

The tooling is meh, the API is hideous and even with the addition of Kotlin, which I do find a nicer language over Java I still dislike it. The ammount of shit needed to make something as simple as store data, manage fragments, integrate with the NDK, make JSON API calls or even shake motions is just ludicrous and counter intuitive. I can see why people would hate Java based on Android, a language that I generally love and defend.
I firmly believe that people extend frameworks or tooling for 2 reasons only:

1 the stack is so awesome that you just want to create packages and libraries to extend the functionality of a powerful environment, like gems for Ruby, python packages, Node packages, php composer, nuget etc

2 the stack is so fucking hideous that people need to fix shit: the entire android square utility framework, butterknife, flutter, react native, codenameone, etc etc

The case with Android is the second. I have not met a professional Android developer that completely likes everything about Android, but will seldom find people that HATE other frameworks or environments.

Android it is for me. Still my daily driver and I love every Android phone I have ever owned. It just makes me feel lots of more compassion for fellow Android devs.

Android dev job question:

"Describe the activity lifecycle and write an application that does x,y,z in accordance with it"

Fullstack dev job question:

"Write some code that interacts with our API and does x,y,z, put the data into our database and build a web interface"

Java backend dev interview :
"BUILD AN ELEVATOR ALGORITHM WITH LESS THAN o(nlog(n)), FIND NEIGHBORS IN A BINARY TREE, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN INTERFACE AND ABSTRACT CLASS?"

Why?

The Bluetooth API for Android is a fucking mess.

So is WiFi direct. Good luck doing anything with it.

That's all lol

My first Android app which is clone of devRant. I hope the read only API available on github is not illegal!

Had anyone experienced with an impatient boss who require you to complete the project in the month you just recently got hired?

Here's the story, I recently got hired by a company, joined on 1st April 2022, the boss expect me to complete the app for Android and iOS by the end of this month. (An e-commerce applications exactly like shopee.com) Without providing me the Backend ApI , that they mentioned. They just gave me a and expect me to know what's happening at the backend.

He require me to give him a specific date that I can launch the app to play store and Apple store. (From my experience, it take days, weeks or months). He need a milestone of what I need , did , and will do (which predictably that they will reject any new ideas proposed) .

I even considering to quit, but I need opinions. Am I just too sensitive or there's something wrong?

Is it wrong to expect some widespread documentation from a $350 billion company to properly document a key part of their upgrade path for a new SDK version? beware any Android devs upgrading from API 3.X to 4.X on the Facebook SDK.......you'll want FacebookSdk.setLegacyTokenUpgradeSupported(true); before your call to initialize.....

Give up. Share Target API is already on Android, even in garbage like Samsung Internet. Desktop native apps are already history, mobile apps are sure to follow. Led by Apple Silicon, we will add JS-specific hardware to the CPUs and conquer the world. JavaScript will be the only language, with an exception being C and Lisp.

Don't know why Google named it Pie... Just doesn't feel right TBH... Peppermint would have been better. Pie feels like an OS every fat kid would have on their phone.

had to create a rather large CLI based application in Java as a graduate level assignment.

Doing shit like this makes me appreciate Node/Python/literally fucking anything else much more for this shit in which storing and retrieving JSON does not have to be that much of a fucking hassle WITHOUT using external libraries(they want it all made by hand)

I love Java, don't get me wrong, but I would rather use it for only a couple of things. I stopped working as a Mobile dev precisely because of Android being shit for Java. No, Kotlin does not fix it, its not the language that is my problem, its the fucking general architecture of the Android API that pisses me off.
And no, I do not care if you like it, like 1 fucking bit. I am not saying that the architecture is shit, I am saying that I did not like it.

Sigh.......oh well. Almost done with the assignment, but still.

Fucking android framework. Sucks my huge ass balls. What is wrong with the people that wrote this?
You implement a fba and hide it when the recyclerview in the corresponding is scrolled down.
Then you change to API level 25 and they fucking decide it would be a good idea to refuse to send the onNestedScroll when the visibility for a fba is set to GONE which is itself not bad, but they also think setting the visibility for the fba when you call the hide() method to... yea you guessed it FUCKING GONE would be an amazing decision. Oh yea you smart ass nice decision I'm so glad you did it.

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....

Meeting at 'Derp & Co', the topic was what data model should send the back-end to frontend & app via API calls:

- Coworker: 'we should send the data structured like this for reasons'.
- Me: 'Yeah, this nested object.object.object should do the trick for the front end, but this will be a pain in the ass to convert to POJOs. Why not use something like idk better structure?'

<Mad/intrigued faces>

- CoworkerS: 'Why you need to use POJOs?'
- Me: <More Mad> 'cause I work with java in android... and we have/need/like objects?

<Captain Obvious left the room>

- CoworkerS: 'Oh yeah, well... we can do it the way you say'.

Why you need Objects... what is the next?
- Git? For what? Did not have the usb key from day one?

Entering Week4 post-layoff. Week2 of pretty much nothing but playing with my kids, doing house chores, exercising and job searching.

I spent like 3 hours in the gym last Friday. Instructor there turned to me and said "tough divorce?". To what I answered "very happily married, got laid off from work". He said that it would be his second guess.

Even before this whole crap I had enough cash flow-yielding investments to just about make rent. My wife makes enough to make sure we will want for nothing, our old folks have our kids' tuition fees covered, and we have some savings anyway.
But the anxiety-laden period between "send a dozen messages and resumė's" and having the same "greetings, fellow millenial!" meetings with different sets of tech-illiterate boomers and toddlers is becoming a boring nuisance, one that "having a side project to keep my mind warm" could solve.

Maybe I will fix the Stardew Valley Mods API for Android. I haven't done the C#/.NET thing since uni, and my frontend Java game is weak (at best) but how much could have it changed this last decade or so? /s

Maybe I will write a MongoDB Runner for Apache Beam. But I'm afraid that won't yeld enough street cred to be worth it Does anyone knows what it means?

Maybe I will finally be done consolidating a lifetime of cloud storage into a big-kid glacier-level LTS solution.

Dunno, bored here. Need some 20h/week project I can quit as soon as some job appears to be lining up. Ideas?

I want to get into game dev, but don't know which engine to choose, Unreal or Unity. Both would be free, because Unreal is free for students. I already know C++, but I think it depends more on the API than the language itself. Maybe I would like to create games for Android too.
Which one would you recommend? Any experience?

Just succesfully converted my entire app from using web scraping data fetching to direct API by reverse-engineering their android app to get to their private API

App is running much faster and more stable now, feels good

// Stupid JSON
// Tale of back-end ember api from hell
// Background: I'm an android dev attempting to integrate // with an emberjs / rails back-end

slack conversation:
me 3:51pm: @backend-dev: Is there something of in the documentation for the update call on model x? I formed the payload per the docs like so
{
"valueA": true,
"valueB": false
}
and the call returns success 200 but the data isn't being updated when fetching again.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:00pm: the model doesn't look updated for the user are you sure you made the call?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:01pm: Pretty sure here's my payload and a screen grab of the successful request in postman <screenshot attached>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:05pm: well i just created a new user on the website and it worked perfectly your code must be wrong
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:07pm: i can test some more to see if i get any different responses
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:15pm: ahhhhhh... I think it's expecting the string "true", not true
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:16: but the fetch call returns the json value as a boolean true/false
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:18pm: thats a feature, the flexible type system allows us to handle all sorts of data transformations. android must be limited and wonky.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:19pm: java is a statically typed language....
// crickets for ten minutes
me 4:30pm: i'll just write a transform on the model when i send an update call to perform toString() on the boolean values
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:35: great! told you it wasn't my documentation!

// face palm forever

Android, the development side.

First it was cool to put stuff together and then i wanted to actually use the phone hardware and realized that the api is terrible and abstracted away in the worst way possible.

Like every java dev would make something like new Camera().photo("penis.jpg") and let the gc take care of the rest but nooooooooo you need persisted objects and datastreams and special permission checks.

Hey fellow devs, my friend showed me this Godot game engine. Ive spent 15hrs over the weekend building strategy game client which consumes my api server. Ive done a lot! It was easy to understand custom Gdscript which is okay. But before i dig in, i want to know what you guys think about this game engine? Is it going somewhere? Is it good option for indie games? Is it good option for building android/ios games? I need to make my mind 🤔

So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.

It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.

I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?

After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.

Getting a location in android is so complicated:
First there's the permissions. Ok add it to the manifest. Oh wait, run-time permissions.
Gotta check if user has allowed the specific app to use location or ask for the permission.
Ok. That's done. Why am i not getting a location? Of course, user can turn it off from settings. Gotta check for that aswell. Or ask for it somehow.
Finally i should be able to get the location! Now, how to I use the Location service to get location in the most efficient way that suits for me? Or should I use the Google api.
Every answer in stackoverflow uses a different method. Oh well, gotta try out them all :).

For all the cheap-ass sys admins:
I wouldn’t pay 100$ a year to apple just to have push notifications when my server fucks up or an user fill my support form but I want to know that in real time but I have iPhone(forget about FCM).

So I downloaded pushbullet to my phone and integrated its API in my server and when something important happen I get completely free notification which (thanks to url schemes in ios) redirect me to my server administration app.

Note: I used xamarin for my management app to be ready for the moment when I switch back to android.

!rant && isSorry = true
this aint StackOverFlow but I need a tiny help here, I'm receiving data result from an API that is formatted as x-www-form-urlencoded, do I add a valid url at the beginning and use URI parser in Android or is there some other solution for it?

Sample of the result I'm receiving:

repositoryId=TEST&response.gatewayCode=BASIC_VERIFICATION_SUCCESSFUL&result=SUCCESS&sourceOfFunds.provided.card.brand=MASTERCARD

A Bible app for Android called Tour the Bible. It uses the Google maps API to put a pin in each location as you read so you can follow along and virtually "tour" the Bible.

I had a basic version built but then I switched to Kotlin then I pretty much completely rewrote it to use an api for the Bible content instead of plain .txt files. I still try to work on it in my spare time but with a family, full time job, full time school and part time freelancing I don't get much spare time.

I remember my colleague who was DevOps guy (15+ years exp) in our one very good project about kids' edutainment.

He always breaks things & blames others when only he had admin access of the tool.

When client was very much interested in Android app, our that DevOps focusing totally on REST API & ignored Android app related DevOps tasks.

Our Android CI/CD was not complete till project ended. Due to his stubborn nature we couldn't take benifit of automation testing.

You can't tell him how to do any task, if you tell then it will be taken by him as an insult to his intelligence.

He would waste his 2 business weeks to find a way to do that task, then he would do some frugal trick half heartedly then he will leave it. Still he wouldn't accept your help due to his ego & he would work on tasks which he likes even though they are of low priority.

He was hellbent on cost cutting so he reduced caching availability to save extra billing, now we couldn't had enough speed for even 10 users to show recommendation feed by API.

Due to this our client couldn't show demo to angel investors properly & didn't get funding.

I don't how with such a bad attitude, he could survive so long.

He had plenty of training certificates (Salesforce etc.) with very little practical knowledge.

God save people of his current & future projects.

So we were making android application for our college festival.. we decided to use Firebase as our primary service for "everything". Decided to use Firestore as database as it wouldn't require much web API call, and mainly as it had a free plan.

We thought that we would never hit the limits of free plan... Needless to say, we started hitting the daily limits about a week before the fest. And it became more of an issue a few days before the fest when we started to hit the limits within 4 hours of the day!!!

But we were lucky enough that the app sustained on the day of festival, lucky enough!!

I am developing a REST api for my android app using laravel.I want to implement web to mobile chat like Facebook's messenger.Any suggestions?

Having a vodka and coke and trying to learn how to use a JSON api on a android app (also learning that). I'm sure it will go well.

Well I can say one thing for sure. The tooling found for Flutter in the form of IntelliJ and Android Studio is far superior than fucking around on a text editor das for sure.

Not really into the continuous nesting of widgets. But then again I was not a big fan of having jsx either.

Both options still better than fucking around with the Java Android api....and I fucking love Java.

Still feels like Google realized that such approach was better, else I don't think they would have justified the creation of the Flutter lib. And yes. I know that it is not a complete replacement for Android Java, but the interfacing between Dart and the Java api feels more natural at least to me and the widgets look native af so we go on with them big plus digits.

So i was working on an android app that communicate with restfull web service. I setup everything , started the web service api at localhost and launched the app on genymotion (virtual machine android) .Nothing seems to work . I checked the code , debugged some stuff and it turns out i couldn't communicate with the api server. I tested the api on my browser and nothing is wrong ,I tried to test on the phone vm browser and voila 404 not found . How the hell it's working on my windows and not on the vm (with localhost url :/ ) .I kept debugging for more then 3 hours with no solution to be found .
The moment I realised wtf I'm doing and how stupid I was => shut down my laptop went to coffee shop and bought a lifeless dark espresso .

In case you didn't understand what the issue is, I was running the api on my windows localhost and testing it with same url on my android vm (I should've changed localhost with my machine IP )

*cloning and building this other team's Android project*
"install API 21, current is 23" K
"needs gradle wrapper 2.2, you have 2.10" umm, OK
"this project is using gradle 1.2.3, current is 2.1.1". (ノ-_-)ノ~┻━┻

Trello's android app doesn't give you the option to choose a board when you make a widget. It just picks one itself based on seemingly arbitrary requirements. Thankfully, trello has a brilliant open API, so there are several capable third party apps.

Why is mobile development still a thing?
Hear me out. All these simple apps, like shopping centre discount, eshops, vinted, other kinds of webapi consumers. Many have a website and a phone app.

Why??? Why the phone app? What's wrong with just embedding your responsive webpage into a webview and call it a day ffs?

I mean, maintenance becomes trivial and there's no split brain. No? What am I missing?

Not talking about apps that rely on android/ios api, for like camera, calls, storage access, sensors etc

8 months ago, me and my teammate developed an API and a web application for one of our client. The API was supposed to be consumed by mobile app which another team was working upon. Now my suggestion for the mobile team was to use something like ionic or react-native. This was purely to keep technical debt on lower side since hybrid apps don't deviate too far for both Android and iOS platforms. But mobile team went with the native apps and developed two separate apps which both have some differences.

The client didn't even use the iOS app since past 6 months. Now all of a sudden she reported several bugs and the person managing the mobile devs put that all on us. I tested some of the bugs and seems like the same feature is working on Android but not on iOS.
Came to know later that the iOS developer who was working on the app had resigned and left the company exactly 6 months ago. Right after the apps first launch. And since then mobile team hasn't put any replacement person for the project. That fucker was trying to buy some time by putting it all on us.
And now here I am, experimenting again with Flutter. So far it seems quite decent.

It occurred to me that I'm making actual money now and I can pay for my shit, so I tried Youtube Premium, but their background play is poorly implemented and defaults to a floating window that I need to cancel in a finnicky, android-vendor-specific way. How do you consistently make something that much less usable than an unpaid open-source developer who also has to reverse-engineer your API and circumvent your anti-user-choice obfuscation measures? NewPipe would be a success if it could just play the videos in full screen with no controls, and yet it has a better background play story than the actual provider. Fuck centralised software

Don't you just love thise dev days that just flay by, looked at the clock now and its just after 5pm,been coding pretty much all day.

Was reading up on progressive Web apps last night and just as a quick test made my own website one, so this morning through I would take the next step.

Few months ago I had made an events list app for android, also just for fun, but I point blank refuse to take it to ios as I see no reason to spend nearly 6 weeks salary on a Mac book because they a bunch of dicks, not to mention the $100 you need to pay each year just for them to annoy you.

Anyway, so after a quick update to my api, no thanks to Gitlab. I put together a fully offline capable pwa in react. So awesome how simply it really was, it's basically done, just needs some polish.

I hate web development
I mean why it has to be everywhere and so important.
I joined college my friend calls 4 days before my quantum physics test. Asks if I wanted to do internship. My reply sure.
( Level of knowledge at that time no idea what API is, what react is but it's just making webpages ) made a nice homepage within 4 hours of YouTube 2 tutorials and 2 developing that. Friend appreciated his manager also liked.
But failed to deliver the complete e-commerce website's frontend.

Comes next, hackathon nothing related to Android specific( I like coding for Android) need webdev in one way or other. One senior asks if want to go together sees my GitHub and rejects politely by my skills ( I would have too).
Went on with my 2 more friends with thought of making an all Android app guys team, next week team breaks. I then got offer from a friend to join with them in web development I agreed now prepare for web development.
Team was rejected internal politics of organizers ( would take no all fresher's team).

Dropped learning webd.
Now started flutter and it feels good and comfortable but stability isn't permanent.

Now seeing GSoC
Sigh...Most requirements are for web , hacktober fest also had things related to web maybe I don't recall. Still thinking about it sigh...

Got selected for college app development team. The head had to be one with excellent webd skills.

Now college provides funding for projects and ideas, prototype requires making prototype. Most easiest thing to work on
.
.
.
.
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web development.

in my previous company , we used to create 4 custom ui states for just 1 screen in android app, and we would have task to create 3-4 new feature screens in 1 sprint (of 14 days) the states would be :

empty state : a state where data is not available. usually consisted of message, a graphic and some action button

data state : the usual state where data is filled on various elements

loading : a shimmer ui showing loading. it was supposed to be pixel perfect to that of the data state. it was basically a different xml, but with grey colored views instead of colorful. the tricky part would usually he to create the dynamic views

error/no connection state : as most of the screens couldbget api error or no internet error, this would be the screen for asking user to retry connection

all of these screens combined with their ui in xmls + kotlin code with barely any stuff being reusable , made the life incredibly difficult. however a lot of our customers would appreciate the interactivity of our app

doing these stuff again nd again , i had become trained to do all those 3-4 (x4) screens and the whole ui stuff in first 4 days of the sprint. but now i am in a company where i am getting passed on to managers after managers and getting tasks to change documentation in 1 week, i find those coding stuff incredibly tough.

gotta get back to shape

lol @ an "Oh well" from an Android API 11 dev

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

!rant - what is everyone's take on React Native? I've been asked to put together a team to develop an MVP for a client. Rather than pull together an IOS and Android dev I was gonna get a React Native developer.

it's an on-demand service, will be looking to utilise Google Maps API, likely will sit on AWS and will also have a website where people can manage their account.

Given that it's an on-demand service there will also need to be a "user" side to it as well as a "service provider" side.

Do we think React Native is mature enough to handle this? I don't have much / any experience with it, but I'm hearing more and more - "Why don't you use react native?"

I am a android developer. Mostly use java. I'm about to Develop an API for our next app. What should i use : php or python?

When you take a break from JavaScript and invest your time on other stuff, you'll realise how paper-thin it is. Java is to JavaScript what Car is to Carpet?

IMAGE COMPRESSION QUESTION

lets say i upload a 100x100 photo from my android device. this image has a size of e.g. 2MB. not a lot. if i compress it then the size will be e.g. 300kB. cool. upload is thunderbolt for any internet speed.

lets consider this case. a random ass motherfucker decides it is cool to upload a 10000x10000 image that has a size e.g. 300MB. compressing this would be e.g. 150MB which is still a lot as fuck for one pic.

heres my question: where should the compression be handled? at backend (REST API server) or client (android image compression library)?

because if i try to send a 150MB pic to the server and their internet sucks but to be fucking honest even the best internet speed would take way too long to upload, is it better to do the compression on the backend or client?

or should i do compression in android? if i should do compression on client then should i;
1) do the compression on the main thread with a progress dialog to wait them until the compression + PLUS the fucking upload is done or
2) do the compression + THE upload in a background thread in which case it can be dangerous for verbose amount of fuckups (internet dies phone explodes etc) and the app crashes

which (one) option of the 2 suboptions from the second parent option branch?

of course this is an extremely unrealistic case, it is possible but thats not my point: my point is WHERE SHOULD THE COMPRESSION (as some kind of universal standard) BE HANDLED AT?

I've been developing Android apps since about 2 years. I learned completely on my own by watching videos and referring websites. Till now I haven't worked on any Big or complex app but now I want sharpen my skills in Android app development,so if anybody needs any sort of Android work to be done I'll be happy to help and there by sharpen my skills..

So I just released my first official app which was a mobile charity solution and platform for all ethical and morally sound non profits appearing on Google via its search and map API to receive funds via PayPal. We integrated paypals android sdk and launched but not even a day in Google Kansas and removes the app saying that we were not compliant with their payment policy even though the 503 exempt IDs were represented in that they stated that in that building needs to be used and Android pay. We attempted to use Braintree payments and they made up some mother excuse now the donation Clause recently was updated to cut 30% from each payment making us by far the most expensive Channel 2 donate. Does anyone know of a work around or solution I could use ? Popmoney ? Maybe...I been reading up on their service and its seems feasible...

Well, been awhile. The latter half of this is probably gonna be unpopular, but the gist of it is that all of the devs working on camera-centric apps, get your shit together, if possible. As mentioned there may not be a way for you to get your shit together, because Google and the others involved ultimately are a mess. In that case, you're dismissed. I haven't proof-read this, so don't take it exactly verbatim.

Woke up this morning to a need for this, so here goes:

----
OPEN LETTER TO SNAPCHAT
----
Snapchat,

You guys need to get your shit together. This is a tack-on to what Marques Brownlee already stated.

I woke up this morning to a seriously FUCKED UP UI. UX didn't change as much, still looks Snapchat-esque. But holy hell WHAT THE FUCK?

I'm not averse to change, despite the above. HOWEVER, there's an exception to that: You cannot change out UX/UI from under me with no warning. I need to know that within the coming weeks, there will be changes to how I interact/interface within the app. An option to opt into testing would be nice as well, but doesn't look like you guys have that figured out. With that testing should come feedback, and something like Jira, where issues can be reported and triaged. You're a company, unfortunately, so I doubt you'd be willing to even go as far as accepting feedback in the first place, which is a shame.

Seriously, as Marques pointed out, Android Snaps are shitty because the app takes a screenshot of the viewfinder and uses it as a photo. There's no doubt in my mind this is something that others do, but all Android devs need to either not pull this (because it's not clever) or just not make apps (quality over quantity).

I would like to see either Google step in and require a native API that is the same across all devices and leverages all cameras to their full potential (I want to say that Snap's issue stems from an API provided by Google. In this case, Google, get your shit together), or alternatively I'd like to see manufacturers band up to provide a uniform interface to deal with this. Because I don't see the latter happening anytime soon, Google needs to do something about this, although I feel like they probably won't. That said, IDGAF WHO it is, I just want it FIXED.

One time, we picked up a Xamarin project and both Android and iOS teams had to pick a developer to handle it. After talking over it with my iOS bro, I decided that I hate C# far too much to start a project on this, even though I wanted a new experience, so iOS bro took over it. I got handed another iOS project in the meantime. iOS bro decides to take a free week from work after like a month or so of working on that project.

GUESS WHO DECIDED TO COME OVER AND WORK WITH US THAT WEEK? THE OWNERS OF THE PROJECT (they were handling the API). Guess who had to drop all projects at once and work for a whole week on a project he had no idea about in a programming language he only had a remote idea about? THIS GUY.

So, aside from the fact that I had no idea what I was doing, I also had the pressure of the owners working right next to me (they were cool people, but it's still a stress). That week really raised my stress level through the roof, as I doubted myself everyday that I would be able to be productive on that project. I got myself a free week too after that.

But yeah, this experience really made me doubt my skills as a programmer, as Xamarin was supposed to be just a cross-platform way of developing an app.

All in all, I've never had to work on that project again... but it was still an "I can't fucking believe it" moment when, one month-ish later, the project was to be scrapped and reprogrammed on ye olde Swift.

Suggest a good back end language to a junior Android developer? I am thinking of learning a back end language ( I'm leaning towards RubyOnRails) for making API and some server side code . What would you guys suggest?

I might have gotten myself in the situation that I have to update this Android app, whose development was outsourced (we're a .NET shop). I just peeked into the APK and realized it's written in js (Cordova).

How fucked am I?

So my boss wants me to develop a complete business management solution + mobile app. (It’s a startup project based company). She doesn’t want to use dubsado / asana / etc and wants me to take the best of all and custom build it for her.
Now I was a mobile app developer. Native iOS and android + recently learnt flutter. No backend or web or api skill.
But screw it, I wanted to learn laravel since a long time anyway so that I could be an independent developer.
So I have agreed and started it...
Bitten more than I can chew? Time will tell...what do you think?

No one loves Java as much as Google and Oracle. They are willing to have a battle in court. Or maybe it is just that $9 billion 😂😂😝

But on a serious note as a former paralegal "I don't think copyright should be applied on a programming language " plus, I feel like even if it is applied... google is using java in it's own way (android) as the courts have stated that you can't copyright a language syntax or API definition. So Google can use the Java langauge syntax and core Java API freely on Android.

I don't know about you but, a lot of clients do bring up their concerns..on what the implications are for them and their company developing mobile apps!!

Any updates? Concerns? Thoughts?

The last one was this Overwatch League Android/iOS client I made in Flutter. Basically wrote two apps in less than a month and learned (and enjoyed) Dart in the process.
I also learned that I'd probably get into trouble if I publish an app which uses a private API without permission. Hee hee.

Really cool and exhausting experience, though. 5/7 😊

Imagine being so rich that you're too lazy to implement payment methods for countries where you product is popular. Microsoft (one drive) and Android (play) was like that for years. I want to pay for openai but it doesn't support ideal/paypal which is the payment method in the Netherlands. Credit card only. Credit cards is so unsafe, I don't understand it's the standard. I won't get one. Is there an api for generating content besides openai?

An Android app to query user details using the GitHub api and display them in charts which can be shared on social media.

Can anyone give me links to any Devrant API? Thinking of starting work on creating a Native Android Devrant app as a side-project.

Why is it so damn hard to integrate an external api into Android in a non messy non tedious way... I mean yes I'm new to this but it's unnecessarily tough..

!rant
Question: If you are making an API for your Android App. Let say you have total of 50 rows currently and you have to sort a table column by price in ASC order.

Will you do the sorting in the Android App or Server side?

I'm starting to get sick of working with handed over projects that previous devs think they are masters of programming and their code is nothing but pure chaos ....

I'm given a project written in Java & Swift, API class is initiated a million times in same view, has access to android context, custom font is applied by creating custom text view instead of applying customization in styles file ....

Still haven't yet looked into iOS code but I'm not expecting much ...

Sometimes I wonder why I chose working with code

I am just student looking for job, and got this pre interview test:
Develop an Android or iOS app with login and password input field, download button, place for image we prvided.

... reading further:
What we are looking for in the code ?
internal quality:
-consistent formatting of the source code
-clean, robust code without smells
-consistent abstractions and logical overall structure
-no cyclic dependencies
-code organized in meaningful layers
-low coupling and high cohesion
-descriptive and intention-revealing names of packages, classes, methods etc.
-single small functions that do one thing
-truly object-oriented design with proper encapsulation, sticking to DRY and SOLID principles, without procedural anti-patterns
-lots of bonus points for advanced techniques like design patterns, dependency injection, design by contract and especially unit (or even functional or integration) tests

external quality:
-the app should be fully functional, with every state, user input, boundary condition etc. taken care of (although this app is indeed very small, treat it as a part of big production-ready project)
-the app should correctly handle screen orientation changes, device resources and permissions, incoming calls, network connection issues, being pushed to the background, signing deal with the devil :D and other platform intricacies and should recover from these events gracefully
-lowest API level is not defined - use what you think is reasonable in these days
-bonus points if the app interacts with the user in an informative and helpful way
-bonus points for nice looks - use a clean, simple yet effective layout and design

... I mean really ? and they give me like 2 days ?

Whoever designed the Android permissions API clearly hasn't used it himself... absolutely hideous

So I reverse engineered the
protocol of QONQR: World in Play and made a mitmproxy addon running locally inside termux that can see when I launch in the game and uses Termux:API to notify me when my ingame resources are replenished.
I direct the traffic through mitmproxy using Drony. I configured it so that by default Drony passes traffic directly to the internet except if it comes from the QONQR app.
The problem is that while Drony is running, there is a chance of network traffic being corrupted so I often get spammed by connection and ssl errors.
So I have to either continue sacrificimg my network integrity or stop getting assistance ppaying QONQR :-/

Does anyone know an alternative to Drony (basically an app that can connect you to a proxy without root using the android vpn api, if possible with filtering by app or ip)?
Also does anyone else have problems with drony on Android 9 or other versions? I don't really have an opportunity to test it.

Edit: It only took 4 tries to post this yay

Hi guys. jeez i have to say i mastered java and python those languages are easy if i keep this up i might be able to make my own api or get into java cryptography maybe show android app developers how to keep their source code safe from reverse engineers to be honest on android i started from python, to java to AIDE (android app), to android studio i even made my first lib file these aren't games im still learning i have like one project is like a clicker game lol

Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.

To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.

So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.

So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.

For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.

So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.

The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.

So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.

Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.

Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.

After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).

So heres the redflags I noticed:

1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is

2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.

3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).

4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.

5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.

So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?

Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.

As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.

I wonder if Google released Flutter because they can't let Facebook have all the fun with react native. Or maybe they did it because they had fushia os in mind for a loooong time. Or maybe because they realized that the android api is overly complicated and the Dart way is easier. Or maybe they did it for the lolz.

There must be a simple, reliable, compatible, battery efficient way to poll an api every ten minutes and send user a notification, right?

AlarmManager : Ok. But who cares about battery anyways?

Google cloud messaging : Ok, you can have battery efficiency. But who lives without Google anyways?

JobScheduler : Ok, but you need Lollipop. Which Android phone doesn't get updates? Oh wait, shit.

I've actually already discussed this one on here I believe

I see this job looking for an android developer for Kotlin with UI experience with XD & Figma and experience with Firebase. I have all of these qualifications so I throw my resume into the fray within an 2 hours the recruiters contact me. they have an offer of 76,000 and I'm looking for junior so I'm like, eh whatever, I give them a copy of my resume and we hold discussion for a few days and then radio silence. I then see a job posting EXTREMELY similar but with a "different company" so I throw my resume in and again within 2 hours I get a call only THIS TIME ITS THE INTERNAL HR. She sounds interested we have a good conversation and sets me up for 96,000 and they schedule me for my first interview within the week. Interview goes great, next I meet with the CTO and we have a pretty good conversation, I'm expecting a technical exam but it doesn't happen instead they give me a case study. they send me requirements for an app API to use, architecture, and a week time span to do it. I finish the app with extra features within 6 days, in my understanding of MVVM and I was excited and happy about this app because its JUST NICE. a week goes by and I meet with the tech team. They grill me on my application, scalability, use cases, how would I advertise or place advertisement and I'm answering everything they love the UI (I included mockups I made on XD), they say everything sounds good everyone leaves with smiles they say they have to find out on what team to place me because they have multiple apps and that HR will be in contact with me in the next few days... A WEEK GOES BY and I randomly get the declination email that next Friday. When I asked for feedback they said it wasn't true MVVM. I was devastated until the next week when I was accepted for a higher paying job that didn't require me to move. After I accepted this job guess who calls? THE FIRST RECRUITER and for this long I was wondering if this was the same job due to the very similar job description so I ask "is your client XXXXXXX?" it was I just told him "I'm good" and hung up

Yo, i have a course where i have to build an android app, and we can make what the fuckever we want. Can you give me some interesting APIs, that are publicly available? It doesnt have to make sense, everything is better than using the anidb api, and thats the only thing that comes to mind.

And then one day I make a change in the API request params in the android app and guess what the iOS app crashes on open :/

So, I made this API which logins to the system and Used it in an android app, there was one roadblock to it, that everytime user enters a password, it has to match the password hash so I, excitingly, used password_verify($password,$passwordHash), unknowingly that it is fucking unsafe and the code is still there, and here's where it gets interesting it is not over SSL/TLS. Fuck me, any bright solutions?

I think the following is all in my head, or I am heading towards an office rivalry situation between my tech lead and me.

characters :
me : a no nonsense android guy who is sometimes very blunt when requested for unwarranted demands. i am also realising that i have been a bit too arrogant, as i come up with a lot of counter questions too fast (not related to story tho)

tech lead : an android guy who has been android dev for a total of 4 years (same as me), 3 of them in current company and somehow got promoted to TL

story: I find this guy to be too much political, delegating a lazy bum, and i kinda called him out in public , once during a discussion where other folks were also kinda calling him out and another time when we were having a small meeting of 3 people. he in turn has taken some actions (like giving me a lower kpi, not giving me appropriate data for doing some work and then asking about it in public, casually ignoring my leave requests) which looks he is taking out a revenge.

at first time i called him out in a discussion where everyone was getting against his havit of giving buttery responses to his boss (who occasionally joins our standups) . he says "we are on track" while we are already dependent on him to provide data/decisions.
he then says to us to do it faster , and when the work does not get completed ( because how it could be, without him doing his job), he blames it on devs.

i called him out on a similar but different topic of him making last moment task additions when we are already on brim with our planned tasks.

on second time i called him out on him not looking into the current task enough as he was expecting me to take decisions on my own.
the decision was about how a screens ui will be populated and there was no api payload available that would match the ui . i created 2 mock api jsons which would appropriately load that screen but was not sure if the 2 apis would be enough for the screen and wondered whete some missing data will come from?
this task is a long one, nd i did took a decision, but he should had validated them to make sure we are on track. the issue came when i took some questions to him and instead of answering them , he blamed on me not being mature enough to work without the data!

All things aside, I am on my weary ends with thins guy. He is my boss and holds incredible powers over me, but he is incredibly incompetent and his habits of delay, delegation and blaming is making my work life worse. I don't wanna leave this job too, because as much as i hate it, its currently one of the major names in industries and giving a solid power to my resume

Spent days to setup a newer-Android version with reverse-proxy-HTTPS certificate in its CA store + one that'd support Google Play and signing in (old school man-in-the-middle).
FINALLY got the API calls of this 1 app whose unofficial client I wanted to make coz their main sucks ass. Just to get stuck on the phone-number-based OTP that they use for their login (:

They send a unique token for each OTP request, I assumed they're using some hard-coded string based function, which they decrypt on their backend to verify.
Downloaded their APK and decompiled. Went through dozens of weird-ass-named classes (coz decompiled). For the 2nd time I thought I had it!

But no -.- they call Google's Firebase messaging for the phone-num OTP n that function simply called firebase, looked into that service n ofc it's very tightly coupled with the calling API's backend

It was fun while it lasted I guess~~~

Don' you just love it when your project leader's superior (who is not involved in development or know a thing about the dev process whatsoever) barges in and asks you to port a project originally targeted for Oculus (and so, very graphiclly heavy) to Android in less than an hour? Obviously when it's not done on time, has performance issues or randomly crashes on a different API it's the dev's fault, not the shitty decision making behind the managers. (btw the company doesnt even have android devices for us devs to test on, we HAVE to borrow them from other colleagues). FML!!!!

My first app to upload to Google Play... I wanted to experiment with the messages API on Android, but I have been delaying it over and over and over again.

Googled for about 2 hours now and can't get this shit working. Trying to launch the Android Wear Emulator through Android Studio using KitKat 4.4 API. I created a new device within the device manager using 512 MB RAM and 128 MB VM. Square Display.

I am running on osx 10.11 El Capitan on Software Acceleration (because hardware doesnt even boot to the android logo). I get the following error when running using ./emulator:

Error while connecting to socket '127.0.0.1:1970': 61 -> Connection refused
emulator: ASC 127.0.0.1:1970: Retrying connection. Connector FD = 25

What does it mean? I couldnt find an asnwer on the net.

This was a project for school, we had to simulate an app that traced bus routes over a map.

All the teams but mine do it in Java (desktop app), we took another approach and did it on Android with the Maps API.

I had fun coding a parser, this parser job was to read a file and load the bus routes and draw them on the map.

It was structured like:

NAME
COLOR
<lat, long>
<lat, long>

The fun part was coding and telling my teammates "chill out, it will work", so we finished, built and run and... done! First code working smooth AF.

I know it's a simple parser and a simple app, but it was a nice feeling not having to debug the app.

this is dumb.. i been trying to learn more about google places' A.P.I so i could implement them in android studios... spend 4 hours and all i can see is garbage tutorial and no detail place. oh at least i got my A.P.I key! pshh my googling skills are failing me big time!. make this shit easier google!.

Can anyone suggest a good REST API for sports data? I have developed an app for Android that shows information and statistics about football league,teams and players. I need to add news feeds,live scores and images. I am using a free API for experimental purpose which is limited. Any help would be appreciated.

"A day in the life of a mobile app developer"

No back-end validation or back-end string sanitisation.
All in the front-end.

Is it possible to develop a wear app for android (devrant) as a third party app? I read that, normally, the main app should process data (like using the API, parsing it and getting the needed data together) and just sends them to the wear to process. Writing a wear app as a third party would mean that the wear app had to calculate the stuff, which is in Googles opinion back practise I guess....?

> 2018
> yay, let's write some android code
> oh look, socialRepository.getMember(memberId);
> let's see what this method does
> ctrl + click
> goes to an interface ಠ_ಠ
> find the implementation
> oh look, apiClient.getMember(memberId);
> let's see what this method does.
> ctrl + click
> goes to an interface ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ
> find the implementation
> oh look, apiService.getMember(memberId);
> ctrl + click
> goes to an interface ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ

At least the last interface was the implementation of the api service with Retrofit.

Dear Instagram api, why do you need to review my app/client for displaying public posts by people? I mean people public-ed them.

Fuck google and their Android-API documentations and guides. I just want a controllable service, that plays audio in the background, not a second Poweramp with android car support

Does anyone have any experience using Spotify web API to play 30-second previews in Android?

What exactly is a full-stack developer/engineer? I'm confused.

So, I worked as a freelance webdev for a US company where I redesigned a pretty complicated website from scratch with PHP, mysql, JavaScript, CSS, HTML5. I only mention those because it will important later.
Basically, it's a lame mvc framework I wrote which heavily relied on AJAX and bootstrap modals.
I built from mysql <=> PHP -> UI
I Also built an android app that communicates with the php api

I worked for 4.6 years and they were kind enough to give me the designation "Full Stack Engineer" so I could put that on my resume. Alright, cool.

Then I go to this interview and one interviewer took offense. He told me that, there are 3 tiers of web dev; Database, Backend shit and UI. And I'm not a full-stack engineer. He then asked me if I worked with frameworks like laravel, symphony etc. [I did but not in this project]. I didn't know what to say. The other interviewer tried to help me, "Do you know what it means? Or have you ever worked with React.js or Angular?".

Didn't get the job and I'm so embarrassed and just feel like I'm a fraud. How could I not know what full-stack is? And why did I put it in my resume? Fuck!

Anyway can anyone tell me what "full- stack *" is?

>inb4
>incoherent
>bad engrish
Just fuck my shit up fam

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

everything is going as planned! :)
Learned Rust Lang. i loved it (that doesn't mean i am done learning na? No! never stop)
new language i could do game memory hacking in without worrying about C++ memory leaks or issues. it also compiles to assembly! another of my favorite languages!
(i use rust for game development and other stuff)

i am not leaving C / C++ though that would be harsh!,

i abandoned javascript for react and typescript.
to be honest the developer just made javascript and left us with a [object Object]

finished learning the android java api so im basically set anything i want to make i can just go on my pc, listen to music and write it out in a couple of days.

well phazor what are you going to do now?!
i will code till i am old.
i will leave my mark like a shid that made its skid in the bowl :)

Aaaaagghh why the fuck Android camera is so complicated!! Camera2 api is wonderful but soooo fuckin confusing i want to kill everyone

Is there an acceptable way to deal with API secrets in an Android app that can cure the anxiety that is slowly taking over me during the past few hours that I am researching about it? Thnx.

p.s. I am not sure how people that work in security can go on with their lives and not have suicidal tendencies

SMB/CIFS support on Linux distros is a nightmare! Switching from wired to wireless will cause ALL mounts to freeze, and they all become impossible to dismount normally. You can't even ls the root folder anymore if there are frozen mount folders inside. It's f#&%ing retarded to have to reboot your PC twice a day because you lost WiFi signal for one second, and the underlying processes don't understand SIGTERM. And I could go on about MTP! Standard file transfer protocol for Android but boy it is hellish. Trying to copy a structure with subfolders will take forever because every ls call to the phone is like an API call to some free webhosting company in Australia, takes forever, if it even succeeds. I won't even get started on WebDAV and SSHFS (the latter is even worse than CIFS). Those make me want to do unpleasant things to my computer. So frustrating! I can't be the only one who has experienced this, right?

I want to become Android developer as well as web developer (Full Stack more likely) , So enlightenment me Devs which API , Libraries, Frameworks i should master?

I was working on this android app and had errors in my code due to low API I upgraded it and synced but the error was still there, ask a colleague to help me he synced it, then cut all the code and pasted it back and bam.. All the errors were gone😂😓 that dude has all the tricks up his sleeve

[NSFW]
nH recently shut down their API due to it causing problem with their front-end (paraphrase of their latest tweet (hopefully latest)). Lemme tell ya mate that front-end is **infested** with pop-up ads that will quite literally pop up at every interaction except scrolling. Pretty sure the shutdown is to ensure their ad revenue rather than making sure the apps doesn't over request (although there can be apps that over-request due to poor coding, in which case I'm sorry).

Kinda justified? Since the page doesn't have the paywall nor anything to grab your money so...kinda justified? Still.

And that's the story of how I became pretty much the only one beside the dev that give a shit about an app for nH on Android.

I've been freelancing lately with an agency to develop an android app for their client and at the same time another person is developing the website .

The story begins when I first contacted the web dev to give me access to the database (because he started before me ).It turns out that this guy purchased an almost ready cms template with a shitty data structure that has no relations between object .This database has no primary keys , no foreign keys , no indexes ... no nothing . Adding to that the web dev refused that I rewrite a new data structure claiming that he has done a good progress on the website .
Forward couple of weeks , I managed to create the api and develop an alpha for the app and sent it to the agency manager .
This bastard told me that the website and design have changed and the app shouldn't be like that .He told me to contact the other bastard the web dev to seen what the changes are . I'm waiting for the response about the new updates and I'm praying that they'll be just minor colors updates or something not a whole concept update .

My problem here is I'm stuck with this fucking agency cuz they paid half of the payment when I started .

Damn I must learn to say no to people .

So me and a couple of my teammates were developing a website for artists where all the things related to artists such as artworks, events, geolocation info etc. happen to live.
2 months down the line, the client comes up with another team who is supposed to develop iOS and Android apps to give the users the ability to leverage this data.
Now this team is so annoying that they want the API according to the specifications they provide. That's really weird. API should be generic, right?

But no, this doesn't end here, the PM of mobile app team comes up with a specification document for the API and what does it contain, a few endpoints which go as below:-
/home - To bring all the home screen data
/events - To bring all the event screen data. But here is a twist, on Event screen, they have defined different sections for Upcoming Events, Workshops, Talks etc. And for each event type they don't want a filtered API but just this single endpoint which will contain all event types data in their own JSON keys.
FML
:/

Best: two actually, a java game that was customizable and had statistics (simples but was great) the other was my first android APP consistent of google maps API and QR code scanner.

Worst: still being made, my first project that consists of doing documentation from scratch about a web app in .net core, and it's giving too much work than it should for a university class project

I have an idea for Android desktop. I was wondering if it would be possible to build the open source Android and chrome os code into one entity and then have them both installed on your phone.

Basically when using phone the user would use Android, and when an HDMI connection is detected, it launches chrome os on the external display.

Is this possible? I know Android has an HDMI connection event hidden in their API. I'm just unsure if the kernels will play nicely together.

mann... either i am dumb or my team is a bunch of excited monkeys.

for last 6 months my senior and this contract dev (both in Android) have been fussing about adding coroutine flows in our codebase: how our codebase "needs" it and how flows will help our codebase become "better"

when i asked them why, they gave me even more shit about hot flows cold flows, state flows, and how ots the latest "solution" from google.

So today, while going through another existential crises in my free time, i decided to understand what these "flows" are.

and from what i understand, it is mainly for cases in which there os actively changing data and we want to get latest updates without any event or trigger, like those streaming datas , chat messages, location etc.

but we are a freaking insurance app! user presses a button and we make an api call! what is the fucking problem here that isn't being solved by good old livedata and coroutines? There isn't any "live" api in app as far as i know and even if there is the code should be modified for 1 such api.

why fuck the whole codebase for a usecase that isn't applicable for 99% of APIs?

also, if a flow is going to auto trigger and call api, how are we supposed to control it? like say there is a offers api(there isn't) which gives us the latest offer products to show user for 5 seconds then refresh. for this i will simply returrn

flow{

while(true){
emit (offer api results)
delay(5000)
}

}

but this is an infinite polling api! how to stop it when say user pressed a cross button or did some other interaction?

it seems useless as fuck.. i can achieve a more controllable polling using the same while loop in different location or some other solution that won't require me adding this wierd api

During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.

Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.

Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.

The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)

It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.

Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.

You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:

1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries

2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc

From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.

This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.

So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.

Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P

Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.

And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.

Developing a News app in android and kinda struck at the point where a new news is added to the server and then to be notified to all users.. I mean I want to know how to correctly implement push notifications and will I need an XMPP server for that ? If so ,then which one do all you experienced devs suggest..?
Thanks.. #awesomeCommunity

I just spent like 4 hours trying to figure out how to make a simple httprequest to the google directions api in android... nothing worked :( running it in a seperate thread, tweaking the address...

I'm sure there is something simple I'm missing... but I'm feeling broken and defeated right now...

They make it look so easy on the android

This is new to me .-.
I just noticed I don't have internet permission in my flutter app Android manifest, yet I'm able to fetch data from an API, how is this possible?

Can't compile the tutorial code in Android Studio without switching to an older API. Anyone know why that is? Does it have any relevance to the API supported by the emulated device?

just finished a prototype for my android app, when i all of the sudden find out about flutter and dart, and i have the fucking urge to rework EVERYTHING just because i fucking hate android studio and java for it verbosity

android studio is good in basically helping you limp along with java, but when i saw how smooth dart code works, i just started getting frustrated at every little complication the android API makes at doing android things in a java way

fuck that, i'm learning dart now

Hey guys, perhaps some of you might be able to help me out.
My current task in my job is to implement an OAuth2 client in Android. I know there are a lot of out-of-the-box solutions for like Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. but I need to make it work with a generic OAuth2 server.

So I tried several frameworks for Android like AppAuth, Scribejava, etc. and most of them are buggy/outdated or aren't working with the Android version I have to use (API 24, Nougat).
I already asked for help in the android-dev IRC channel, but to no avail. Also looked up dozens of repositories on Github.

I'm rather desperate right now, because I'm running out of time :(

Any help/pointers are appreciated!
Thanks!

How do you guys prefer to hide the API keys you use in your (native) Android apps?

I'm an Android noob and the app I'm building uses some NLP services which are accessed through a key. I searched around and found a few techniques (obfuscation, serverside storage, etc.), just wanted to know what you folks recommend.

Firebase api is good simple and alright but when you want to add it to your android project , you want TO KILL YOURSELF. OK first gradle works then say oh you should update your gradle you update it . then it says cannot resolve firebase:core WHaaaaT? OK YOU SEARCH FIREBASE API FOR AN ANSWER THERE IS NOTHING THERE. then stack overflow come to your help you should update some FUCKING package that firebase didnot mention you should update and all this time you say dns is wrong , firebase is filtered your country again, and after you update thise tow package you found out that you should update your android studio too for just one line code(firebase mentioned this but I said noooo it's just optional) .

Where have i been?
school > home > school > home > school > home
every day for 7 days a week.
Learning the Java Android API just finished learning about checkboxes and switches
my first school i started in when i was little got hit with rona (covid)
my sister's school 4th grade class got hit with rona (the whole class tested positive except for my sister's friend which tested negative Lucky by a strand of hair. if he wasn't in the morning annoucements then he would be sick)
didn't shut down the school to at least clean or did contact tracing just resumed normal work stuff
wearing a mask everyday to get a face breakout
the bathrooms and schools itself are getting damaged by devious licks which includes stealing and or damaging school property even taking bathroom toilets and soap / towel dispensers and selling or using them hmmm anyone else have anything thats worse than mine?

In android 7.1, I've seen a lot of conflicting reports about crypto security.

If I do something like the following in the default android 7.1 browser...

var array = new Uint32Array(n);
window.crypto.getRandomValues(array);

How secure would the resulting numbers be overall? I'm asking because I've seen a lot of articles talking about it, but they never specifically mention the default 7.1 android *browser* and what or how it obtains secure random numbers. They only ever talk about the api, sdk, and developers working in java.

Android DevStudio. So much work for a simple button! Even worse when you're trying to call API and explicitly return a type of data that you need.

Gson is an excellent library every Java/Android developer should know. You can easily parse a Json or XML network response into a POJO class and get ready to go. But the guys who started the project I currently support found a better, smarter, slicker way to parse network responses into memory:

ArrayList<ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>>>

I would love to meet the genius who came up with this idea. I mean, you can parse absolutely any API response without even having to define stupid Java classes or importing libraries! And also you can reutilize the same scheme for literally all Java projects that handle API responses! Wonderful

Begin to hate Java, moving to kotlin soon . For android development at least with Jetpack compose. Java is deprecated in almost every API.

What the fuck is happenning with android? Latest AS 3.4.1 and SDK 29(Q+) does not allow normal app compat artifcats for a new project and whole project needs to be developed with androidx.* artifacts.

And their androidx.* artifacts are fucking incomplete: i wanna test recycler view clicks and here i am , fucking myself on how to do so, coz The espresso RecyclerViewActions api is in android.espresso...* package and not androidx.espresso...*
FUCK FUCK FUCK YOU ANDROID WHY DO THIS TO ME WHY WHYWHY!!!!!

Fuck google, fuck android, fuck their engineers. Trying to implement paging library 3 from last 10 days. Hitting my head for 10 fucking days. I even created a REST api for this. Before it i was using firebase sdk. After trying everything. As last resort I put my code on their sample source code. still same problem. only god knows how their sample works but lookalike my code doesn't. My Problem is recyclerview keep loading more items without me scrolling.

Do anyone have any experience with Android's "Telephony" API? Google' documentation is not all that helpful when trying to get this to work and other resources are far from available.

Working with a client, so can't go in to too many details. (According to them, it's top secret...🤫)

Thanks!

I have the following scenario with a proposed solution, can anyone please confirm it is a secure choice:
- We have critical API keys that we do not want to ship with the app because de-compiling will give access to those keys, and the request is done before the user logs in, we are dealing with guests

Solution:
- Add a Lambda function which accepts requests from the app and returns the API keys
- Lambda will accept the following:
1. Android app signing key sha1
2. iOS signing certificate sha1
- If lambda was able to validate them API keys are sent back.

My concerns:
- Can an attacker read the request from the original (non-tampered) apk and see what the actual sha1 value is on his local network?
- If the answer to the question above is yes, what is the recommended way to validate that the request received is actually from the app that we shipped and not from curl/postman/script/modified version of the app

Genuine rant 😫
Volley library the heck.
The request that is added to the request queue is being executed on Android 7.0 and above but is not executed in any API level below that.
Try and help me please.

I started to use the MVP architecture for Android App development a year ago with a project that wasn't all that complex. My project manager liked the idea but despite that we continued with an MVC'ish approach for other projects (corporate bullshit restrictions). Yesterday I reopened the project after 8 months and Iam wondering why the fuck didn't we switch to MVP I just created 6+ screens with little to no effort including data feeding from an internal API. I would like to hear your experience with MVP architecture.

hey guys i need your advice about backend integration for android. I have this junior and I want to teach him about integrating REST API and handling it with volley+caroutines or retrofit+rxjava. currently the junior is using firebase for authentication and firebase realtime db for all CRUD operations. problem is that by using firebase backend the junior won't learn networking/multithreading stuff. Is there a way to use firebase realtime database like a REST API?

Any way to run some python code in android without losing my mind !? It is just a code which queries a simple api once a minute and logs it into a sqlite db. I want to use my phone as a substitute for a server instance, cos i dont have the monies to buy one..😬.. SL4A aint working.. P4A webview isnt working for some reason.

Does anyone have any clue as to how can I call samsung health api directly from c# - not by using android sdk..

God damn the android camera 2 API is a giant pain in the ass. First I got it all working on my emulator, then I thought "hey let's set how it looks on my fancy phone!.... Oh... Ok."..

So at much fiddling I managed to merge the Google sample with my requirements and got it working on my phone. Then I'm sitting in the train, fire up the emulator and to my surprise IT STOPPED WORKING ON THE EMULATOR AAARRHH!

anyway, it's working on my device which will suffice for now.

Now I'm trying to chop the video into images and... Wait... Google... What do you mean your don't support the Java media framework?!?

😭😭😢😭😩😩😖😡😡😠😠😠😠