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Almost two years doing AI programming in Android, feels like time is flying and with a baby in my family I just don’t have much time to share my experience. But here we got after a not-so-short break of posting on the blog. What companies seem to expect nowadays? In today’s AI world, most software companies expect that you will deliver more and more simply by using AI. Expectations are that managers will code, designers will use AI to design and programmers will quadruple the features they deliver because “Hey, can’t you simply use AI to do it?”. A sentence that you can easily hear multiple times in a week. ...

AI is here, and the best we can do now is take a look at it and not ignore it. I have been using Cursor with Claude for the past six months, both on personal and work projects of various sizes, and I can tell for sure that it handles some tasks with ease, while others are a huge struggle until you intervene and give the right direction. But even with that in mind, it still manages to save tons of hours of writing templates and sometimes makes me wonder whether my brain is working less effectively just because I can ask it to figure out a given problem for me. But here are the major problems that I experienced with it until now.

I had to implement this migration for an object that was stored in DataStore using Protobuf and Kotlinx Serialisable on Android. The original object looked like this: @Serializable data class Assignment(val state: State) @Serializable sealed interface State { @Serializable data object Pending : State // More implementations } The new object was supposed to look like this: @Serializable sealed interface State { @Serializable data class Pending(val id: String) : State // More implementations }

Very often when building an app, you get taken away in the code architecture, building different components, and getting stuff done. You want features out, and very often you don’t have time to optimise stuff. Sadly, this is the way software development has gone in recent years, especially during the IT layoffs in the recent couple of years. One thing that always gets missed and usually gets resolved is that your app just becomes slow. ANRs or Application Not Responding is an often thing that happens with mobile apps and people learn about it only when people actually start complaining from it. “Hey, we see a dialog that says Close app” is the most common thing you will hear from users. And this is when you realized they have already opened Pandora’s box for you. I hope with this post to make you aware of how to identify such potential issues and try to fix them before they occur. Let’s go.

Jetpack Compose Navigation goes hand in hand with Jetpack Compose. The issue comes when you are coming from XML navigation. Passing arguments between screens is very easy in XML and by extending from Java.Serializable interface, everything was working like magic. But now, you open the Pandora’s box with Jetpack Compose and here is how you could fix it.

Jetpack Compose is the coolest kid on the block, but it has various different drawbacks that I at least notice when we did the migration of the app I was working on. And I wanted to share them in my blog with everyone, just in case you need to do the same thing in your app.

Blackbox tests are tests that are being done end-to-end. This means a UI automaton clicking on your mobile app that connects to the actual backend server - not prod, of course, but something close to staging. On Android specifically, you could use Espresso or UiAutomator to achieve those results.

Implementing R8 optimizations can always be a nightmare for the dev that has to do it. R8 is a compiler that works together with ProGuard to shrink, minify, and obfuscate your code. It can reduce significantly the APK size by removing classes that are not used at all. It checks the hierarchy of classes and once it sees a class is not being attached to anything, it removes it. The above, of course, is a double-edged sword as in some cases, it can remove classes that you actually need like request/response classes and many others. But in a recent project, we got like 10 megabytes of reduced APK size (down from 30) which is a huge gain. The problem comes when you want to tell R8 to keep certain classes that you need either deobfuscated or simply kept within your dex archive. So let’s see what the approach could be in such cases.

Resolving javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed Recently, I tried to build an Android project and it failed with the above error. It was a super nasty error to fix and I spent quite some time on it.

We had one issue where people tend to create adapter classes inside fragments as properties and then forget to clear them out in onDestroyView. This actually creates a memory leak due to the adapter very often holding references to objects that were already destroyed. To prevent this from happening, we decided to create a custom lint rule that detects if you have an adapter field in your fragment class and warns you that it should be part of onCreateView instead.