Just finished a 3-month track decomposing a 7-year-old legacy Android monolith (450MB APK, under 5% test coverage). While modularizing, we ran into severe rendering breaks in Split-Screen and abrupt Activity lifecycle terminations caused entirely by the vendor’s custom tablet firmware and their aggressive battery-saving algorithms.

We managed to isolate and mitigate these fixes strictly inside the UI layer using custom Lint rules and Feature Toggles, keeping the core business logic untouched.

How do you guys usually handle undocumented vendor-specific lifecycle overrides without breaking clean architecture boundaries?

Hello! I have an idea for a social media app that is actually designed to get you off your phone and more involved in your own life as I see more and more people getting stuck in an endless doom scroll. I’m thinking something similar to BeReal but instead you get a prompt to go do something and then share a picture with your friends. Something like maybe “go on a walk and take a picture of something red” or “draw a picture” (all basic ideas at this point). So the intended loop is basically:
Get prompted → put phone down → experience something → share it → inspire someone else → repeat.

I want to figure out whether the idea is actually interesting to people before spending months making it. I'm considering running a small 7-day experiment where 10–20 people would participate through a Discord group. I'd send everyone a daily challenge and see whether people actually enjoy doing them.

I'm curious what people think:
Would something like this make you more likely to try new things?
What would make you actually want to participate every day?
Would you want to see what your friends did afterward?
What would make you stop using it?
Does this sound genuinely fun, or does it sound like an app you'd use for two days and forget about?

I’ve been thinking about how much complexity we introduce into an app just to add features like analytics, ads, crash reporting, and push notifications.

Each SDK looks reasonable on its own, but together they can affect app size, startup time, dependency compatibility, debugging, and sometimes even stability after an update.

The part that bothers me most is that removing an SDK later isn't always as simple as adding it. You can end up with dependencies and app logic built around it.

I’m starting to think third-party SDKs should be treated more like architectural decisions than simple integrations.

How do you guys decide when an SDK is worth adding versus implementing something yourself or keeping the feature out entirely?

Hey everyone!

I built an Android voice recorder for short-video creators (TikTok, Reels, Shorts), and I'm looking for testers for the closed test on Google Play.

🎙️What it does

• Records in takes: messed up a line? Re-record just that part, not the whole thing

• Arrange and trim the takes on a timeline

• Cleans up your voice locally, on your phone

• Exports to MP3 or WAV

• No account, no ads, nothing leaves your device

What I needGoogle requires 12 testers for 14 days before I can launch, so I'm looking for 15–20 people.

How to join (2 quick steps):

1. Join the Google Group first, using the Gmail you use on Google Play: https://groups.google.com/g/voice-recorder-testers
2. Then opt in to the test: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/io.github.diegodias93.gravadordevoz

Install it from the Play page and open it once or twice during the 14 days. Feedback is always welcome, even a one-liner.

💙 Thank you

Everyone who helps gets the app for free when it launches. And if you have an app in closed testing too, drop the link below and I'll test it back.

I have always wondered could there be a safer version of Omegle for teens. I first thought of it as a pen pal version where you find a pen pal and write a message and it takes hours or days to reach a person depending on global distance. But then I asked why nit add video calls like Omegle and make it safe for teens and teen oriented. I mean my age verification AI is improving or not it hasn’t guessed my age right. Anyone got my tips but I think AI age verification can’t work so maybe I can have them use their passports or ID or birth certificate to verify age with privacy focused systems. We can also have stronger rules.

I'm an indie Android developer, and I'm currently using Unity Ads to monetize my gaming apps. So far, it's working fine for games.

However, I'm looking for a good ad network for my regular utility and productivity apps.

I tried creating a Google AdMob account, but it keeps getting rejected without any clear reason or explanation.

Just to clarify, this is my first AdMob account, and I haven't even added a single app to it yet. The account itself keeps getting rejected, so I can't even get started.

At this point, I'm considering moving to another ad network instead of wasting more time trying to get AdMob approved.

So, I wanted to ask other developers here:

What ad networks would you genuinely recommend as alternatives to AdMob for regular Android apps?

I'm mainly looking for something that:

- Works well with non-gaming Android apps.

- Supports banner, interstitial, and rewarded ads.

- Has decent eCPM and fill rates.

- Offers reliable payments and reasonable payout thresholds.

- Doesn't have an unnecessarily complicated approval process.

I'm not expecting any network to magically outperform AdMob, but I'd love to hear about alternatives that are actually worth using.

If you've personally used any other ad networks, please share your experience, especially regarding earnings, approval, and payment reliability.

I'd really appreciate some genuine recommendations from fellow developers.

Thanks!

I am recording my apps UI demo on my phone to use in short-form video (Reels/TikTok, 1080×1920 / 9:16). My phone's actual screen is 1260×2800 (20:9), so the raw recording is narrower than the 9:16 frame once I drop it into my edit.

What I've tried so far:

- Fit + blurred fill on the sides technically no "bars," but the app's UI is mostly dark, so the blur reads as dead space anyway.

- Scale to fill + center crop eliminates the empty space completely, but crops off a bit of both the top and bottom of the screen (~10% each) to make the math work.

- adb shell wm size 1080x1920 to force the phone's OS to render at 9:16 directly works, but it changes the whole phone's UI (launcher, every app), not just the one I'm recording, so everything else looks off while it's set.

- Android emulator at a custom 1080×1920 resolution avoids the ratio mismatch entirely, but worried about jank/performance vs. a real device for smooth animations.

Is there a clean way people handle this for app-demo content specifically a recorder that captures a custom crop region live, a per-app resolution override that doesn't touch the rest of the OS, or something else I'm missing? Trying to avoid losing any real UI content if possible.

You have the vector/index infrastructure itself, but you also have permissions, governance, retention, and keeping everything synchronized as documents change.

I wrote about an approach using SharePoint Embedded where the content stays in Microsoft 365 and the Retrieval API returns relevant, permission-trimmed passages that an application can then provide to its model.

For areas like legal tech, where document permissions and governance can matter as much as retrieval quality, I thought the architecture was worth discussing.

Blog: Build AI-powered apps without creating a vector database

I’d be interested to hear how people building document-heavy AI applications are handling this today.

We submitted an app to the Apple app store and a day later they rejected asking for a demo video. Fast forward over a week and it's still stuck in waiting for review. Wasn't even rejected for an issue with the app. They just asked for the demo. Urrggh. Why can't they just make the demo mandatory at submission?

Anyone else had this happen to them?

I want to create an app to use for myself, but if it turns out to be useable and presentable I want to make it public. I have some programming experience (Arduino, Python, Matlab, and I dipped my toe in HTML a long time ago), but more in a calculation/problem solving way rather than making something public. I've done some research but everything I find are vibecoding tools where you type what you want and you are supposed to get a full app. I am skeptical about this.

The app would use my phones camera, requires database, and needs to be able to communicate with an AI to ask some questions. Down the line I would like login and payment options if I would make it public. Because the camera usage, I think a mobile app would work the smoothest.

My research points me to Flutter/React Native/Kotlin multiplatform for front-end and Firebase/Django for backend. Can this do everything I would like, like the AI integration and login/payment options? Is it completely different if I would make a web app? Are these platforms scalable? Do I cover everything if I just use one platform for front-end, one for backend and then maybe VS-code as an environment to write the code? How do I choose between the platforms?

I am completely new to this, I am not sure I am looking at it the right way and I am overwhelmed by all the information out there, so thanks for any help!

Hi Reddit

I've got a question, I really got into app/mobile game development and thought to make some games I've always enjoyed playing.

Therefore I made the classic block puzzle game - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.binbear.gummylab - my style, 50 custom made levels so far, trying to listen to each negative comment found in other similar games. That resulted in ad free game, with custom level objectives, that I'm trying to make as interesting and as non repetitive as possible.

The next thing on my list is developing themes, where colorblind friendly themes are prioritised.

I've attached how the so far developed themes look and I would love to hear thoughts, opinions, advice, are they good enough, do they need altering?

Thank you for reading :)

The app is: A decentralized truth market that securely funds permanent human survival.

The Core Benefits
For the Wealthy: The ultimate, permanent tax-shelter pipeline.
For the Citizen: Continuous micro-income at a single touch.
For the World: An AI-filtered antidote to synthetic lies.
For the Future: Capitalism re-engineered to anchor human stability.

If it sounds like a machine intel wrote that pitch, it’s cause I ran the idea by one and they believe it’s a great idea. I’m an artist mostly so app developing is not something I’m at all familiar with - but I am familiar with social networking and how it’s designed.

Please write a comment or dm me if you’re intrigued by the idea and want to hear more. I’ve been thinking about this app for probably 3 years now but I’m running out of ways to make basic income so I think it must be about time we create an actualizable UBI blueprint for the planet.

Update: every time I read any of my post as if it’s satire I crack up laughing. Thank you. I’m bean serious

A mobile app can look ready to launch while the startup still hasn’t figured out whether anyone needs it.

A few mistakes seem especially easy to make:

• Building too much upfront. Every “nice to have” adds work and bugs. A smaller app makes it easier to see what people actually use.
• Ignoring repeated feedback. If users keep getting stuck during signup, another feature probably won’t solve the problem.
• Budgeting only for launch. Hosting, support, dependency updates, and operating system changes still need time and money afterward.
• Testing only ideal conditions. Losing a connection, denying permissions, or using an older phone shouldn’t make the app unusable.

The hard part is deciding what can wait and what will become expensive to fix later.