Initial Responses to Uncomfortable Questions

A couple of months ago, I asked some uncomfortable questions about App Signing. Those were sparked by Google’s declaration that all new apps have to be distributed as App Bundles, which in turn require App Signing. App Signing introduces a big problem: Google can modify apps before they sign them. And while Google on its own may not necessarily have...

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“Elements of Android R” FINAL Version Released

Subscribers now have access to the FINAL version of Elements of Android R, in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI/Kindle formats. Just log into your Warescription page to download it or read it online, or set up an account and subscribe! I concluded that there wasn’t anything else that I really wanted to cover in this book. So, with a few really minor...

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A Poor Default (Or: Why Your Button Does Not Work)

Android Studio 4.1’s new-project wizard creates projects that include the Material Components for Android library by default, and sets up the default theme to use Theme.MaterialComponents.DayNight.DarkActionBar as a base, at least when using many of the templates. For an experienced developer, this is a reasonable choice. However, a new-project...

3w

Where Compose Could Go

This week marked the Milestone 1 release of Jetpack Compose for Desktop. I wrote about this back in April, when the first desktop-related artifacts showed up. It is great to see this continuing to move forward. There is no published timetable for a stable release, but it will almost certainly be after Compose itself becomes stable sometime next...

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“Exploring Android” Version 1.9 Released

Subscribers now have access to an update to Exploring Android, known as Version 1.9, in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI/Kindle formats, in addition to the online reader. Just log into your Warescription page and download away, or set up an account and subscribe! This update adds a new tutorial, for scheduling work with WorkManager. It also makes...

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“Elements of Android R” Version 0.4 Released

Subscribers now have access to Version 0.4 of Elements of Android R, in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI/Kindle formats. Just log into your Warescription page to download it or read it online, or set up an account and subscribe! The existing material was updated to reflect the shipping version of Android 11. And, a new chapter was added on device controls....

Oct 2020

youtube-dl, and Avoiding Pointless Copyright Problems

Yesterday, youtube-dl, a popular command-line utility to download YouTube videos, was taken down from GitHub. And, near as I can tell, the justification of the takedown is over sample links, where those links point to copyrighted material. This seems flimsy, but I’ll leave it to the various attorneys to sort that out. Regardless, for the time...

Oct 2020

Android Studio 4.1, Library Modules, and VERSION_CODE

Android Studio 4.1 — or, more accurately, version 4.1.0 of the Android Gradle Plugin — has a breaking change: it no longer adds VERSION_CODE (and, sometimes, VERSION_NAME), to BuildConfig. This was originally reported back in June, with Canary 4, but despite being a P1 ticket, it did not get resolved before AS 4.1 shipped. I found out about it...

Oct 2020

Android Summit Presentation Materials

As part of my presentation at yesterday’s Android Summit, I published a resource page related to the Android “software supply chain” and security issues. (originally, this URL pointed to a broken copy of the slides — I sincerely apologize to those who tried to access this immediately after the presentation) This page has links to a few dozen...

Oct 2020

“Elements of Kotlin” Version 0.3 Released

Subscribers now have access to Version 0.3 of Elements of Kotlin, in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI/Kindle formats. Just log into your Warescription page to download it, or set up an account and subscribe! In this update, there is one new “main” chapter, covering significant changes in Kotlin 1.3 and 1.4. There is also a new “Kotlin, WTF?” short...

Oct 2020