Recently, I had to add a perfect squared CardView and I wanted to achieve this without hardcoding its width and height. I happily discovered the power of ConstraintLayout. And so this is how I managed to create a perfect square which should work on every dimension. Heres some sample code that I used to create […]
Why Your App Feels Slow on First Launch You’ve optimized your layouts, trimmed your dependency graph, and profiled your Compose recompositions. Yet users still report that your app feels sluggish the first time they open it after install or update. The culprit is usually JIT compilation — the Android Runtime compiles your app’s bytecode to
From Shared Logic to Shared UI If you’ve been following the Kotlin Multiplatform story, you’ve probably already shared networking with Ktor in a KMP shared module and persistence with SQLDelight across platforms. The next logical question is: can you share the UI too? With Compose Multiplatform, the answer in 2026 is a confident yes. JetBrains’
Why Unstructured AI Coding Fails for Android Projects You open your AI coding agent, type “add a settings screen with dark mode toggle,” and the agent immediately starts writing code. Three minutes later, it’s generated a SettingsActivity with XML layouts — except your app uses single-activity Compose navigation. It didn’t check your architecture. It didn’t
Why On-Device AI Matters for Android Developers Every AI feature you ship today probably depends on a network call. The user types something, your app hits an API, waits for a response, and displays the result. It works, but it comes with latency, server costs, and the uncomfortable fact that your app is useless without
The Gap That Claude Code Fills in Code Review Code review is one of the most valuable things a team does — and one of the most time-consuming. Reviewers catch real bugs, but they also spend energy on things that could be automated: spotting forgotten null checks, flagging coroutine scope misuse, noticing that a ViewModel
What Are Kotlin Contracts? If you’ve worked with Kotlin for a while, you’ve likely encountered functions from the standard library that seem to have almost magical powers. Take require() and check()—call them with a condition, and the compiler somehow knows that if execution continues past that line, your variable is no longer nullable. Or use
A Pattern I Noticed Over Time Every now and then I watch a YouTube live stream. Not regularly — maybe a few times a month when I’m in the mood and someone I follow happens to be live. Could be a coding session, a Q&A, a product launch, whatever. I enjoy the format. There’s something
What Is the WallpaperColors API? Android 8.1 (API 27) introduced the WallpaperColors API, and it remains one of the most underrated tools for building personalized Android experiences. It lets you extract the dominant, secondary, and tertiary colors from your user’s system wallpaper and apply them to your app’s theme in real time. On Android 12+
The Problem: Primitive Obsession You’ve probably seen this pattern in production code: database IDs represented as Long, user emails as String, currency amounts as Double. On the surface, it’s simple and pragmatic. But it introduces a subtle bug vector—primitive obsession. Imagine you have a function that accepts a user ID and a post ID, both
Why Android Keyboard Animation Matters When your app shows a text input and the soft keyboard slides up, that moment sets the tone for user experience. A jarring jump or a laggy animation feels cheap. A smooth, synchronized transition where your content slides up in perfect sync with the IME (Input Method Editor) feels polished
What Is the Choreographer API? The Choreographer API is Android’s internal frame timing system — the heartbeat of smooth animation. Every frame your app draws, the Choreographer orchestrates the timing. It synchronizes with the device’s VSYNC signal (the vertical refresh of your screen), and it exposes a callback mechanism so you can hook into that
LLM Prompts for Code Refactoring: Structuring Your Requests When you’re facing a large refactoring task in your Android codebase, asking an LLM the right way can save you hours. Unlike simple coding questions, refactoring requires your AI assistant to understand the architectural context, the business logic you’re preserving, and the specific constraints of your project.
Generate Architecture Documentation Automatically from Your Codebase You know the problem: your app’s architecture documentation is either non-existent, wildly out of date, or buried in scattered wiki pages that nobody reads. By the time you onboard a new developer, they’re confused about module boundaries, data flow, and how components talk to each other. Modern LLMs
Creating Realistic Sky Gradients That Change With the Sun When you look at a great live wallpaper, what makes it feel alive isn’t just animation — it’s the sky. A static blue-to-orange gradient at the top of your screen feels dead after five minutes. But a sky that actually shifts through dawn blues, golden hours,
