Up until Android 13, applications did not require explicit user permission to post notifications. Applications could post notifications soon after application launch, end-users always had an option to disable notifications from settings but by default, notifications were enabled. In Android 13, to help users focus on the notifications that are…

This article walks through the steps on how to integrate a published version catalog in your Gradle project. It assumes that readers are familiar with Version Catalogs and does not touch upon the details of versions catalogs are. Refer to my article Version Catalogs in Gradle 7.0 to know about…

This article assumes that readers are familiar with Version Catalogs and does not touch upon what versions catalogs are. Refer to my article Version Catalogs in Gradle 7.0 to know about Version Catalogs. Quick Recap Version Catalog enables build authors to centralize the dependency coordinates (group, artifact, version) of their third-party dependencies…

SDKs/libraries are very important for any ecosystem and things are no different for the Android ecosystem. I have been building and shipping Android SDKs/libraries at scale for over 7 years now. Penning down some of the practices I follow that can help us write better SDKs. Use Android Annotations Using annotations helps reduce…

Currently, there are multiple ways to share dependency versions between projects in multi-project builds. For example, users can declare versions or dependency coordinates directly in build scripts (in the ext block), external files (e.g dependencies.gradle), in buildSrc. In version 7.0 Gradle has introduced an incubating feature to centrally manage dependencies…

In Kotlin 1.4 a new compiler feature called explicit API mode was introduced, especially for library developers. What is Explicit API Mode? Kotlin compiler offers explicit API mode for library authors. In this mode, the compiler performs additional checks that help make the library’s API clearer and more consistent. It adds the following requirements for…

Starting in Android 11, whenever your application requests permission related to location, microphone, or camera, the permissions dialog will contain an additional option called Only this time. If the user selects the Only this time option in the dialog, your application is granted temporary one-time permission. Temporary permission means that…

Before getting into how to get Geofence working on Android 11 let’s get an overview of what Geofences are in general and how they work. What is Geofence? A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geo-fence could be dynamically generated — as in a radius around a point…