Droidcon Lisbon

The Android community is a fast evolving society of excellent people who passionately involve themselves in their ecosystem. This means the progress of developments can be fast, blazingly fast! Inspired by other content creators and newsletters that keep us informed about the most recent events, I decided to document news, events, and releases every week for a year. Starting from the end of Droidcon Berlin, the world’s best Android developer conference. ...

In software development, mocking is a popular technique used to simulate dependencies and test behaviour without relying on external systems. However, as with any technique, there are pros and cons to using mocks. In this talk, I’ll discuss why using mocks may not be the best approach and why we should instead use fakes or in-memory implementations of well-defined interfaces. We will explore the drawbacks of mocks, including how they can lead to brittle tests, slow down development, and make it difficult to refactor code. ...

The Android Paging Library makes it easy to integrate complex paging behaviour, gradually loading small chunks of data at a time to help reduce usage of network bandwidth and system resources. The library allows you to implement this behaviour using compositional components in a decoupled architecture making your code more reliable, scalable, and testable. Furthermore, you’ll be able to use familiar components such as LiveData or RxJava to interface with your existing architecture. ...

Fragments have often been the controversial, and to some, the stuff of nightmares, with the inconsistency of lifecycle events, complex UI interaction, and unexpected behaviours making many Android developers suspicious of their usage. But with the development and recent stable publication of the navigation library, it may be the right time to give them a chance. Giving Fragments a second chance is not something I’d ever thought I’d be saying, but it’s a fantastic opportunity to find a solution to sharing data across a single screen. ...

Kotlin has taken the Android world by storm, and is quickly becoming the most popular language of choice. With Coroutines now stable, does it make sense to replace your RxJava implementations for Coroutines? Despite the hype, it may not make sense to jump on the bandwagon just yet. RxJava has already proven its stability and usefulness, and a comparison between the two frameworks shows that they are simply better suited for different purposes. ...