Android
Articles on Android performance, Kotlin optimization, Gradle builds, and building responsive Android apps.
Android engineering articles 811–840 of 942
Smarter ToDos With Kotlin
Kotlin's built-in TODO() is great, except it crashes your app in production. Kaushik Gopal built something smarter.
Optimising Flipkart Android App size to sub 10 MB
Flipkart slashed their Android app size by 40% in 21 months. The result? A 34% drop in uninstall rates and massive gains in emerging markets.
Enhancing Appium Android Tests with Advanced Techniques
Raj Varma from Bumble's engineering team reveals how to give your Appium tests superpowers. His solution lets test code directly call methods inside your Android app—solving problems that seemed impossible.
Automating Mobile App Localization
Dmytro Khmelenko reveals how Freeletics turned localization from a bottleneck into a fully automated pipeline. The results? Measurable revenue spikes in newly localized markets and zero manual translation work.
Developing Android Studio Plugins With Gradle
Mihaly Nagy from Groupon reveals you don't need IntelliJ IDEA to build Android Studio plugins—just Gradle and a text editor. If you've automated tasks 3 times, it's time to build a custom IDE tool.
Kotlin at Trello: Mobile Development Best Practices
Vishnu Rajeevan from Trello shares how his team went from 0% to 30.8% Kotlin in just over a year. Their strategy? Start with tests, then make every new feature Kotlin-only.
Implementing Twitter's App Loading Animation In React Native
Ever wonder how Twitter's delightful logo-to-app loading animation actually works? Eli White reverse-engineered it and the solution is counterintuitive.
Optimise Because Performance Matters
Saurabh Arora from Viki cut their Android app's memory footprint by 27% while preparing for the Next Billion Users. His team's optimization work landed them as an Android GO launch partner.
Shrinking APKs, Growing Installs
Sam Tolomei from Google Play reveals a brutal truth: every 6MB you add to your Android app kills 1% of potential installs. And in emerging markets, the impact is even worse.
Why the First Ten Minutes Are Crucial for Mobile Game Retention
Adam Carpenter from Google reveals that most mobile games lose over half their new players in the first 10 minutes. The data shows exactly where retention breaks down and how top performers avoid it.
Improving Performance with Background Data Prefetching
Instagram serves 800 million monthly users, 80% outside the US. How do you make the app feel instant for everyone, regardless of network quality?
Battery Instrumentation at Facebook
Facebook was flying blind on battery drain across a billion devices. User-facing battery percentage? Too noisy, too coarse, and deliberately inaccurate by design.
High-Performance App Development: Common Bottlenecks and How TripAdvisor Measured Its Way to a Faster App
TripAdvisor ships a 100MB app every two weeks to millions of users. One regression could tank performance for their entire user base.
Efficient and healthy background data prefetching at Instagram
Instagram's background prefetching could easily drain batteries and waste data. Here's how they built a system that's both fast and responsible.
Multi-threaded rendering on Android (with Litho & Infer)
Facebook's mobile team tackled one of Android's toughest performance challenges: keeping UI rendering smooth without blocking the main thread.
The future of multi-modal interfaces
Meta has been quietly building the foundation for interfaces that understand speech, vision, touch, and text simultaneously. The future of mobile isn't single-mode anymore.
Multithreaded Rendering on Android with Litho and Infer
Meta's News Feed team solved what many thought impossible: smooth multithreaded rendering on Android at massive scale.
Kotlin: An Exploration of Sealed Classes
James Shephard from BBC explores how Kotlin's sealed classes can fundamentally reshape your Android architecture. What if callbacks aren't the answer to async operations?
Mobile Apps: iPlayer Tech On The Move
Ross Harper from BBC's iPlayer team reveals how they ship to 45+ million downloads across thousands of device variants. Their secret? A shared codebase that builds two distinct products.
Reactive Clean Architecture with Android Architecture Components
Lucia Payo from N26 reveals how combining RxJava, Clean Architecture, and Android Architecture Components created a system where code writes itself faster over time. The secret? Infinite data streams that never...
Color Your Apps in React Native Using Material Palette
Want your React Native app to automatically match its UI colors to any image? There's now a library that taps into Android's Material Design color extraction magic.
React Native Performance In Marketplace
Facebook cut React Native Time to Interaction in half on low-end Android devices. The secret? They stopped trusting their testing tools and went straight to production data.
Map Performance Comparison and Judy Data Structure Alternatives
Marko Kevac from Bumble's Platform team benchmarked 6 associative array implementations to replace their aging Judy data structure. The winner? Not what you'd expect when memory matters.
Mind Maps for Fast and Effective Testing
Kateryna Sprynsian from Bumble's iOS team ditched traditional test cases for something faster. With weekly releases shipping multiple features, her team needed a testing approach that could actually keep up.
Android Instant Apps at Thumbtack
Francis Kam from Thumbtack reveals how they partnered with Google pre-launch to build one of the first Android Instant Apps. The results? Instant app messages now equal their full installed app.
Strava Mobile App Versions
Jeff Remer from Strava explains why their mobile app jumped from version 5.14 to 14.0 in just four months. Spoiler: it wasn't feature bloat.
Android Tech Stack Overview
Wahib-Ul-Haq from Freeletics opens the vault on the complete Android tech stack powering four production fitness apps. This is the kind of transparency engineering teams rarely share publicly.
Integrating React Native in an Existing Application
Guillermo Orellana from Bumble's tech team walks through the real-world pain of integrating React Native into an existing Android app. Spoiler: the official docs won't save you.
RxJava 1 -> RxJava 2 (Disposing Subscriptions)
Migrating from RxJava 1 to RxJava 2? The biggest gotcha isn't what you think—it's how you dispose of subscriptions.
RxJava 1 -> RxJava 2 (Understanding the Changes)
RxJava 2 was a complete rewrite with breaking APIs. If you're still on version 1, here's what changed and why it matters.