10 Things Newbie Android Developers Face

From the translator: I tried to state everything as close as possible to the original. The translation turned out to be in free form - I think it would better convey the meaning of the article. There are tooltips on the pictures. The original is here .

I decided to write about some typical mistakes and problems that I once encountered myself when I started developing Android applications three years ago, and several others that new Android developers faced. So let's go!

1. That moment when you made all the pages of your application using Activiti, and your boss told you that he wants the pages to be turned with a swipe

And you try to explain that before you can change the application pages with a swipe, you need to redo the activation into fragments

Tip: one of the best decisions you can take is to always use fragments, and activate it only to manage the fragments. Activiti is the prehistoric tradition of Android. The use of fragments certainly benefits. But this is not the rule, but only one of the ways to avoid such a problem.

2. When you try to collect the release version of the application, after adding hundreds of dependencies, and you receive mysterious and incomprehensible errors from ProGuard, which cannot be fixed

Tip: Depending on the workflow, it is a good practice to put together a release version of the project and not to wait for months until the project is completed. This will allow you to test the application and easily identify errors while the code base is still quite small.

Another good practice would be to check the rules of ProGuard for frameworks that are applied in the project. It makes sense to add the necessary ProGuard rules for the library and everything should work well.

3. When you are trying to update code that was written without observing any architecture

Tip: this topic would occupy the whole story. It is best to check the old code and write a few tests, eliminating errors in it, before starting refactoring. Believe me, if this is not your own project, you will not want to rewrite it from scratch.

4. When you forgot to upload a ProGuard mapping file to Firebase crash analytics, the last build crashed with obfuscated errors

Tip: you can set up automatic loading of ProGuard’s mappings into Firebase crash analytics tools. Read more about this here .

5. When I uploaded my first app to the Google Play Store and received only 50 downloads in three months ...

Tip: first of all, it is better to create applications that people need, then you will find success in the market. Also, the application will not be able to advertise itself.

You spent 500 hours of your time creating an application, and you can not afford to spend a few dollars and a hundred hours to promote it?

6. When did you return to your code that you wrote 3 months ago

Tip: this is both good and bad. Good - because you have become better at writing code in the last three months and now you see your own mistakes. Why bad? In fact, nothing serious: you grew up in three months and you are unlikely to make similar mistakes

7. When trying to build a project in Android Studio on an old, weak computer

Tip: There is an official guide on how to speed up the project build.

8. When your application crashes only in release-mode and you do not see the logs to see what is happening

Tip: the simplest solution is to implement a crash reporter, such as Crashlytics , and you can fix the error in the console.

9. When you wait for the backend developer to complete the API.

Tip: You can ask the structure of the future API from the backend developers and create a layout using any fictitious data for work. This will not always work well, and sometimes you have to make some changes in order to work with the real API later.

10. When your app has become popular in the Google Play Store.

Tip: Turn on your favorite song and dance! You did a great job and it was not in vain!

Try not to lose popularity in the market, and start holding parties (Please invite me).
Keep making awesome apps that people need, and remember: