Digging into Android: Intents and Sharing

If you have spent much time with Android development, you have likely run across Android’s Intent object. Intents show up pretty regularly in the official Android tutorials and frequently appear in StackOverflow answers. Until recently, all I knew about them was that they were used in everything from navigation within an application to media playback […]

Seamless Integration of Android’s Soft Keyboard

Recently, I was working on a feature for an application where the user would interact with Android’s soft keyboard. I found working with this keyboard to be more confusing than I would have expected for such a ubiquitous feature. Baked into most Android smartphones, it is highly customizable, but at the cost of making some […]

Embedding YouTube Videos in Android Applications

YouTube is the largest video sharing platform in the world, so it makes sense to include its videos in a mobile app. In this article, I’m going to cover how to add them to your Android application using YouTube’s official API.

Data Binding with Live Data for RecyclerView in Kotlin

When working on an app in Kotlin or Android, it’s very common to use RecyclerViews to display lists of information. Typically, this data will be built up in ViewModels and passed to a list adapter. This works fine for most things and allows interaction with the items. Usually, they don’t need to change directly in […]

Three Methods for Solving Android Data Binding Errors

Trying to figure out what is causing data binding errors when you compile your Android project? This post will save you a lot of time and frustration. There is nothing worse than the compiler telling you something’s wrong in your project but not telling you where. If you are getting cryptic errors like error: cannot […]

Chaining Views in a ConstraintLayout Programmatically

One of the biggest challenges of building elegant mobile interfaces is making them adapt properly to the full gamut of screen sizes. This is especially true for Android development. Back in 2016, Google introduced a new container view class called ConstraintLayout which makes this task much easier. One nice feature of the ConstraintLayout class is […]

Android Room Database Tips and Tricks

One of the nice things about Android development is having the power of a real SQLite database to store data, along with built-in support in the framework using Room. Room is an abstraction layer over SQLite. It has a lot of nice features, but it also has some limitations.

With Jetpack, Android Development Has Leapfrogged iOS

Over the past six years, I’ve done a lot of iOS development (and written a lot about iOS). I would say it’s been the primary focus of my career. But as a software consultant, I need to be flexible, and I’ve done my fair share of Android development as well. I’m currently working on a […]

Creating a Custom Gboard Sticker Pack – A Guide for Android Newbies

Recently, Google started allowing developers to create custom sticker packs for Gboard on Android. In case you’ve never heard of Gboard, it’s Google’s latest virtual keyboard. Available on both iOS and Android, Gboard is an all-in-one keyboard that includes glide and voice typing, a predictive word engine, and stickers. It is also the built-in keyboard […]

Supporting Old Android Versions with Multidex

My current Android project needs to be backwards-compatible with every Android version back to Android 4.4 (KitKat). Meeting this requirement can be difficult and frustrating for a number of reasons, but with KitKat installed on ~10% of all Android phones worldwide (at the time of this writing), it’s still worth supporting. One of the issues […]

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Android Development