Weekly Digest
Mar 9 - Mar 15, 2026
7 articles that week
Enabling R8 optimization at scale with AI-assisted debugging
Grab's Android team cracked a 6-year problem that stumped multiple attempts: enabling R8 optimization across 9 million lines of code. One engineer led the charge, and AI was the secret weapon.
Reclaiming Terabytes: Optimizing Android image caching with TLRU
Grab's engineering team just reclaimed terabytes of storage across 100+ million Android devices without breaking a sweat. Their secret? A clever twist on a decades-old caching algorithm.
Patch Me If You Can: AI Codemods for Secure-by-Default Android Apps
Pascal Hartig explores how Meta's Product Security team uses AI to automatically patch security vulnerabilities across millions of lines of Android code. The challenge? Doing this at scale without disrupting thousands of engineers.
WTH is Remote Compose
Remote Compose sounds like science fiction: your server sends actual drawing operations to Android devices, and they render natively. No JSON schemas, no component mapping, just pure Compose instructi...
Level Up: Test Sidekick and Prepare for Upcoming Program Milestones
Maru Ahues Bouza from Google Play reveals how 600 million monthly gamers are now using Play Games Services, with Level Up features driving 2.5 billion incremental game installs in 2025 alone.
Remote Compose: Back to the Future
Arman Chatikyan just built a visual UI editor that deploys Android screens without app updates. Remote Compose lets you design layouts in a browser and render them natively on device—no WebViews, no JSON schemas, no code.
Is SwiftUI finally as fast as UIKit in iOS 26?
Jacob Bartlett puts SwiftUI and UIKit through the ultimate stress test: a feed of 22,000 animated GIFs running at 120fps. The results might surprise you.