Top tips for refreshing Android skills with the Little Miracle prototype

Over the last few weeks I have been working on a prototype of a pregnancy contraction tracking app and wanted to share some tips from my experience so far.

Go native with Android

Android has a number of native solutions for problems you may experience during your development. One really good example of this is using java Threads vs TimerTask vs Handlers for updating the UI based on clock or timing events. In this case I was using the timer to schedule asynchronous events to update the user interface which is an anti pattern. When updating the user interface the best practice is to use Handler solutions. If you are seeing leaked context warnings or experiencing issues with thread scopes then there is probably a better way.

Compat[ibility] is main route

The compatibility libraries are not so much extras as the normal way to build things. When prototyping they can help hide a lot of the complexity of the ever evolving Android ecosystem. Unless you are developing for a specific device then the compatibility libraries are a must!

Changing teams at Google

After spending a little over a year working with Ads partners I am now moving to a different team working with Google partners! Part of the transition involves getting up to sped with Android development so I will be building a demo app over the next few weeks and wanted to share my experiences.

To make things more interesting I will be starting out with an older version of Android (Nougat) and migrating my app to new versions. At the same time I will migrate the app from Java to Kotlin.

In order to make things as real as possible I will be creating an app in a very competitive space (pregnancy tracking) and launching it on the app store. As I go I will share useful resources and guides that I tried to help me.

Hello World

To get started I will be taking a couple of courses to refresh my knowledge as it has been a year since I built an Android app and I am guessing a lot has changed. Here's where I started:

• Install Android Studio.
• Developing Android Apps (fundamentals) on Udacity.
• Kotlin for Android Developers on Udacity.
• Android Fundamentals on the Google developer site.
• Android Developer Fundamentals