When Android released version 6.0 Marshmallow (yes, a little outdated at this point), a whole slew of new developer APIs came with it. One that I’ve personally enjoyed as a consumer is fingerprint authentication. I skimmed over the official docs, and even through their Fingerprint Dialog Sample but had a difficult time following what was going on.

Eventually, though, I was able to recreate the flow. This post is going to be a step by step guide to integrating your own fingerprint dialog in your Android application.

After two years of blogging on this site, posting various tutorials and Android discussions I felt were relevant, I’m now looking to share that experience with others. Blogging has been an invaluable experience for me, as I learn just as much as I get to teach when I’m thoroughly researching and writing a post. There’s no reason for me to keep this opportunity to myself, though.

Third party libraries are a huge part of mobile app development. Popular tools like Retrofit, RxJava, Picasso, and many others prevent Android developers from reinventing the wheel everytime we need to do something over the network, asynchronously, or loading images.

However, developing and publishing these libraries can be intimidating to many people. I think this occurs for a number of reasons - worry about keeping up with maintenance, being outshined, or sometimes thinking no one would use your code. I have many thoughts on those ideas, but will save them for another blog post. In this one, we’ll just go over a step by step guide to creating and publishing a library to JCenter.

Controlling the brightness of your phone can be a hassle. Currently we’re stuck with the two step process - swipe down on the notification drawer, and then deal with the slider trying to get it just right. However, with the release of Android Oreo and a new fingerprint gesture API, a new solution was born. Enter DigiLux.

Espresso is a testing framework for Android that allows developers to write automated tests for their applications. The benefit of automated testing is that you can write a test plan, and simply hit run and have all of the important features in your app tested effortlessly, and arguably more consistent and thorough than manual testing. There is no doubt that it is a lot faster.

However, one of the lesser known development patterns for automated testing is the robot pattern, which makes writing tests much easier while providing a painless way to update tests whenever your app changes. Let’s take a deeper dive into what makes the robot pattern so powerful, and how to implement it in your next test suite.