Add a shadow to your Text composables with no effort — When it comes to styling text components, adding a drop shadow is a well-known effect widely used in various graphics, apps, and websites. The drop shadow effect gives the illusion that the respective object or text is elevating above the underlying content. In this article, we take a look at…

Easily reduce your Android app’s startup time — A common problem when it comes to optimizing the performance of an Android app is the initial startup time. When you have an app that needs to initialize a variety of components that rely on ContentProviders, the initial app startup time can significantly increase. This could lead to an initial…

Position composables within their parent's exact coordinates by using other elements as anchor — While using Jetpack Compose, in most cases you will only need the ordinary way of laying out composables in a fixed layout structure. However, dynamically aligning UI elements by the x and y coordinates (absolute coordinates) on the screen is a relatively common task that you probably stumbled upon when…

Replace Android’s SharedPreferences Key-Value store with a safe to use asynchronous API — In one of my last articles, I showed you how you can implement the Proto DataStore in your Android project. How To Use Android’s Proto DataStore With Kotlin Support Asynchronous type-safe persistence of objects in a key-value store mannermedium.com However, in this article, I will show you how you can implement the second variant, the Preferences DataStore. While the Proto DataStore can be used for persisting whole objects, in…

Dependency Injection for Android Apps has never been simpler — The Koin dependency injection (DI) framework has already a reduced complexity in comparison to other options like Dagger. However, using the latest Koin version 3.2, we now can make use of a few new functionalities that reduce the complexity of integrating DI into our Android app even more. One of…

Asynchronous type-safe persistence of objects in a key-value store manner — Persisting data is essential in almost every Android app you are going to develop. When it comes to persisting single values or just setting “flags”, using a fully functional database like Android Room is an overkill for such key-value data. Instead, for these cases, we stick to lightweight key-value stores…

A practical migration guide considering the latest breaking changes — In one of my previous articles, I presented the great Compose Destinations library to you which drastically facilitates the navigation implementation in our Jetpack Compose-driven Android apps. Type Safe Navigation With Jetpack Compose Destinations How the jetpack compose navigation library should have been from the beginningmedium.com

Handle accessibility needs while remaining content visibility — When it comes to professional mobile app development, you will most likely face the requirements for supporting accessibility needs. In the context of developing Android apps, this term can mean that, besides laying out the overall UX to be easily usable for everyone, you should have an eye for the…