So I got bored and reverse engineered Claude for Windows and found a fully functional Android Emulator ready to release!

wanna nerd out on the details, click here.

I added a feature to the productivity app I’m building that adds one capybara to your home screen for every hour of screen time. The capybara keeps reminding you about your screen time and encourages you to stop using your phone if your screen time gets too high, while also making it harder for you to use your phone.

What do you think about this feature? Is it a stupid idea, or do you think people would actually use it?

Hi everyone,

I built GuideKit Compose, an open-source coachmark and product tour library for Android and iOS.

It supports customizable spotlight overlays, target highlights, instruction cards, smart arrows, multi-step tours, automatic scrolling, navigation callbacks, and per-step styling, all through a shared Compose Multiplatform API.

It is available on Maven Central and licensed under MIT.

Website and demo:
https://tharukack.github.io/guidekit/

GitHub:
https://github.com/tharukack/guidekit

I’d appreciate feedback on the API, documentation, compatibility, sample project, or anything else you think could be improved.

Wireless debugging is great until you actually use it day to day. Three things kept costing me time:

1. The connect port changes every time you toggle the setting.

2. The pairing port is different, single-use, and dies when you close the dialog.

3. A phone on the wrong subnet fails identically to a real protocol error, so you can't tell a network problem from a broken adb.

So I built adb-nearby.

npx adb-nearby scans your network. If there's one device, it connects — that's the whole interaction. If there are several, it lists them and you pick.

adbn pair prints a QR code — scan it with the pairing dialog and you're done. No typing codes, no chasing ports.

MIT, no telemetry.

https://github.com/JassiSingh08/adb-nearby

Built an iOS/Android app that runs local Llama/Gemma fully on-device (no cloud inference), plus nearby phone-to-phone messaging over Bluetooth that works in airplane mode. Also supports chatting with local documents on-device.

Looking for technical feedback from this community:

- What model sizes / quantization's are realistic on mid-range phones?

- Any known pitfalls with on-device inference UX (load times, thermal throttling, context limits)?

- For airplane-mode nearby messaging + local AI, what would you want to see next?

Happy to share demos / details in comments if useful.

Hello Everyone I have built an app which can control the hardware also we can use the android phone sensor and its data to control the hardware its still not completed yet but work is still in progress.

I’m currently in my 3rd year of college, and honestly, I haven’t done much in DSA yet.

Right now I’m doing an Android development internship, and alongside that I’ve also been building and publishing my own apps on the Play Store because I want to eventually build my own startup/product.

The problem is that our college placement season will start around January, so I’m getting a little confused about what I should prioritize from now.

My current situation is basically:

\\- DSA: Very weak / haven’t done much

\\- Android development: Decent and currently doing an internship

\\- Personal projects: Building and publishing apps on the Play Store

\\- Long-term goal: I’d like to build my own products/startup

\\- Short-term goal: I obviously need to be prepared for placements

Should I completely put product development on hold for the next few months and focus heavily on DSA + my internship?

Or should I continue my internship, keep building my apps, and try to manage DSA alongside all of this?

I’m worried that if I focus too much on DSA, I’ll lose the momentum I’ve built with development and my own products. But at the same time, I don’t want January to arrive and realize I’m completely unprepared for placements.

For people who have been in a similar situation, what would you do if you were in my position?

Would really appreciate honest advice, especially from people who have gone through campus placements while also working on development/projects.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the current state of the mobile development market. Beyond a general contraction, it seems to be moving away from contracting toward permanent positions. Are any of you looking into multiplatform frameworks or pivoting to a different engineering domain?

8 years away from Android,  applied for backend/tooling roles at Google. They decided I should interview for an Android role, had to catch up for all the lost time.

To help bridge this gap, I started approaching the whole thing historically, and wrote an article about Android's platform history, to both learn and get out some steam over the how much was actually changed...
In the process of prepping (and later), I built returnzero.dev - specifically the Android System Design module. I wanted to create something similar to what HelloInterview does for backend, but tailored to Android.

Android Core Concepts: All the core concepts important to talk about Android intelligently in an interview.
System Design Guided Practice: An tool to help you build your designs on an Excalidraw canvas, with AI guided practice, and get step-by-step feedback.

Most of the course is completely free, including the guided practices on several core designs.

Happy to answer any questions and receive any type of feedback :)
Thanks!

Frankenstein Ultra is publicly downloadable now. It uses a separate companion runtime called Victor and gives an AI agent access to a real project workspace, files, terminal, build tooling, and other development capabilities directly from the phone.

This isn’t just a code-generation interface. The goal is for the agent to actually work through development tasks: inspect files, modify code, run tools, read failures, rebuild, and produce runnable software.

I’ve used it for Android projects, Node/npm projects, and other development workflows.

Right now I’m mainly looking for feedback on things like:

• what works well and what doesn’t
• bugs or crashes
• device compatibility
• confusing UI or setup
• features that feel incomplete
• things you expected it to do but couldn’t
• agent behavior that feels wrong or repetitive
• build/runtime problems
• performance, battery, RAM, or thermal issues
• features you’d actually want added or improved

You do not need to be an Android developer to give useful feedback. If you’re curious about AI coding, mobile development, automation, or just want to try something unusual, I’d still like to hear what your experience is like.

If something fails, details such as your device, Android version, what you were trying to do, and where it failed are especially helpful.

Website: https://stitchlab.dev/
GitHub: https://github.com/sedds89/StitchLabtools

Main thing I want to know: what works, what doesn’t, what’s confusing, and what would make Frankenstein more useful to you?

There is no pay walls its Bring your own key and supports Oauth for Grok and Codex open router or cline. Could probably integrate more just not sure what is wanted or needed.

I'm a Junior Android developer who has been working on an app for the past nine months. During this time, I have had many doubts about how to properly manage initialization tasks, such as:

- Reading initial preferences from DataStore

- Checking if the user has completed onboarding to decide the starting screen.

- Validating the authroization token (redirecting to the SignIn Screen if expired, or to Home if valid)

All these tasks have one thing in common: they need to run when the user opens the app for the first time, when the app comes back to the, or when it gets repened.

For this reason, I would love to hear your perspective on how you structure and handle this process in production apps, as well as any resources you recomended to help me gain seniority in Android development.

Currently, I've thought about using MainViewModel that only collects StateFlows (without holding domain logic). For navigation, I'm using a Channel injected by Koin with a sealed interface to emit events, which are received inside a LaunchedEffect to execute backstack navigation using Navigation 3.

What are your thoughts on this approach? How do you handle startup routing in your projects?

The 12 testers-14 days requirement is aimed at personal developer accounts. 

What Google does not seem to make clear is rather or not organization accounts are exempt.

Although I cannot say what the rule is, I can say what happened to me.  

Timeline (The following information is from Play Console commit history)



The organization's developer account was created on July 16, 2026.

Initial submission (July 21): Includes closed beta testing, store details page information, and app content. Released.

Closed test track iterations: July 22, July 29, and July 31 (twice).

Submitted to Production: August 20, 2:06 PM. Released. The review process took only a few minutes.

There are only 7 internal testers; the closed test track exists purely as a means to pass the audit.

There was no requirement such as "12 testers participating in the test for 14 consecutive days".

Surprisingly, there were no "hard barriers" to overcome. I was never prevented from submitting to the official version. The reason I waited until August 20th to submit was because I was waiting for Apple's review results (Apple's initial review takes 13 days). My console showed only one official submission record, and it was released that afternoon.



The actual cost of organizing an account (it's not a free shortcut):



You need to apply for a DUNS number for your legal entity. It's free, but it takes time.

Your legal name and address must be identical word-for-word to those in your state business registration information, Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) records, and store payment details. Any mismatch will result in organization verification failure.

The key lies in Dun & Bradstreet's (D&B) records, not the Play Console itself. If you need to change the address, you must first update it in D&B, wait for the information to sync and take effect, and then update the store information. This takes several weeks, not just a simple settings change.

Your business address will be publicly displayed in the "About the Developer" section of the Play Store page. Anyone browsing that page will see your full street address, phone number, and email address. If you registered as an independent developer from home, your home address will be displayed.

This last point is worth considering before choosing this option, and it really surprised me.



Important: Google does not offer exemptions for organizational accounts, so this is based on my personal experience and is not professional advice. Please verify this information yourself before relying on it.



Official page: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/14151465

I built minimo because most video compressors either upload private footage or hide useful controls behind a subscription. I wanted compression to stay fully on-device, with a simple UI for normal use and enough control when presets are not enough.

Key features:

• fully on-device compression using native Android codecs
• batch compression with per-video progress
• simple presets and advanced controls (resolution, bitrate, frame rate, H.264/HEVC, audio)
• before-and-after comparison before saving
• automatic cleanup: if a compressed file is not at least 10% smaller, the new copy is deleted
• input copies and unsaved outputs stay in temporary app cache, cleared on cold start
• light and dark themes, 12 languages

Pricing: Free. No account or subscription.

Privacy: Videos are never uploaded. All processing happens on-device.

The project is free and open source: https://github.com/minimo-pro/minimo_video

Hey folks! 👋

Whether you’re a college student, self-taught developer, designer, or just someone who enjoys building things — I’m looking to connect with a few people in Bangalore to work on startup/side project ideas together.

The idea is simple:
Build cool stuff, learn along the way, and meet like-minded people locally.

If things work out, awesome 🚀
If not, we still end up with:
- Real projects
- Practical experience
- Better portfolios/resumes
- And a strong network of builders in Bangalore

I’ve been in the industry for around 4 years, so I can help with things like deployment, engineering workflows, scaling, and shipping products in the real world.

If this sounds interesting, drop your:
- GitHub
- LinkedIn
- Portfolio
- Or anything you’re proud of building

Let’s make something fun together 🤝

I was not expecting that communicating with testers would be that difficult.
Maybe it will help you if you have the same issue.

I had around 200 testers for my side project. Great news but my contact email got flagged as SPAM and blocked for a few days when I tried to sent app test url to them.

Almost half of my users did not received the test url and I was unable to reach them because I was blocked.

I did not want to pay anything to mailing services so I just setup a google group with testers email. It worked great without any related smap issues.

Hope it will help someone in the same situation as I was

I’ve integrated AdMob into Android apps quite a few times, and there are some non-obvious things that aren’t really covered by the basic documentation.

I decided to write down some of the things I’ve learned from doing these integrations, using an Android game as a real-world example.

If you’re working with AdMob on Android, maybe it’ll be useful:

https://nadyabr-codes.github.io/admob-android-game.html?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=admob_post

Curious to hear your opinions and experiences as well.

I have been laid off yesterday. I'm gonna use all my time to apply and read books that helps me land the next role. My priority right now is landing my next job and increase my knowledge.

I plan to read:
1- Mobile system design interview guide
2- Kotlin coroutines: deep dive
3-Kotlin in action

I want something about DSA and something about modern android development and maybe something about compose. I already know these stuff (as much as a 2 YoE can know), but i want to expand my knwoledge and go a in depth.

I created an app using gma next gen and it was working fine in production. Later I wanted to test mediation with a custom third party so I found myself switching to the old sdk. For whatever reason it performed horribly so now I've switched back to the next gen sdk again.

The issue is that even though my test ads work both on the debug and release build but for some reason my ad units have stopped working. From the logs I can only tell that every time one attempts to load it return a no fill. It's been like that for a couple of days. I've got a Rewarded and Native unit.

Anyone that knows what the issue might be?

Hello, I noticed the lack of a proper Java-only implementation of ZSTD (I know zstd-jni is fine, but it uses native libraries and is kind of heavy too) that also supports Android

So meet the murine-aircompressor library

After checking out version 2.0 of aircompressor, which is exclusively Java-only and used JDK 8, I saw the maintainer claimed Unsafe was not available for Android and therefore Android support was out of scope for it; however, that turns out not to be the case, Unsafe can be used on Android and there was only one single method and a static field which are missing on the Android implementation of Unsafe, I just made a helper method for the former, choosing the right implementation, while the static field was just a call to an existing method, and Bob's your uncle.

But not satisfied, I made a few changes, a lot of which are kanged from other forks the maintainer ignored:

- improved compression a lot (original fork that implemented this change here) - added an option to switch to the former behaviour too

- added a ring buffer mode and set as degault (also kanged from another fork, seems to improve performance over largely incompressible data)

- exposed levels for the streaming compressor

- added FAST algorithm to also support levels 1-2 on top of 3-4 which were the only supported ones in the original (level 2 is also pretty good and way faster; Claude is, however, mostly to praise [or blame] for this one)

- Improved overall performance on ARM (again, Claude is mostly to praise/blame here, but I did a lot of tests)

- added parallel compression support because fuck it

- added a wittle tar (with PAX) implementation because fuck it again, I wanted to make .tar.zst without qdding extra libraries

Using WindowSlideMode.HIGH_SPEED resets the library's (ORIGINAL) shit compression ratio for the stream, but makes it faster, I suppose; I default to HIGH_COMPRESSION which is still decently fast, and if you want it to be faster, it's much much better to use level 2 with HIGH_COMPRESSION than the default level 3 with HIGH_SPEED in my experience

Overall, the library is a little slower than zstd-jni with the (now) default parameters, but now matches its compression ratio, and may be a good compromise you'd rather want a lightweight full-java implementation than the heavy .so files in your apk

EDIT: I also noticed this may sound like I'm trashing the maintainer, I'm not lol, just stating facts, the maintainer is awesome for creating the library on the first place

I just got rejected from the store after adding an app to expand my base app (that already have mau)

The issue is that it's a TV app, and I've tried to open it up for phone access just to pass the bridge but I got rejected..

Any help would be appreciated

" More testing required to access Google Play production

We reviewed your application, and determined that your app requires more testing before you can access production.

Possible reasons why your production access could not be granted include:

Testers were not engaged with your app during your closed test

You didn't follow testing best practices, which may include gathering and acting on user feedback through updates to your app

When I build my own Android application, I have spent more amount of time into defining the architecture, not actually writing the features.

And more importantly I believe that if you want to scale an application in future then architecture plays a huge role. A well designed architecture allows you to introduce new features or even integrate a different language or technology without having to touch or rewrite a large portion of the existing code.

So it could be related to Jetpack Compose, state management, navigation, modularization, dependency injection, offline-first architecture, testing, or anything else. I am interested in decisions that seemed unnecessary at first but it ended up paying off as the app grow.

I’m trying to understand a couple of pain points QA teams deal with regularly:

• How do you figure out what needs to be tested after a feature is added?
• When a test fails, how easy is it to tell whether it’s a real bug, flaky test, or locator issue or test data issue, or environment issue?

I’m exploring whether these are actually big enough problems to solve, so I put together a very short survey.

Would really appreciate any responses or even thoughts in the comments. (1min max, just clicks)

Lik: https://forms.gle/1EyP5Bz3CNBB2DrM7

Thanks!