InfoQ Homepage Android Content on InfoQ
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Hidden Costs of iOS/Android Shared Development, at Dropbox and Slack
Building a new native mobile app requires a lot of work since it is necessary to code it in Kotlin/Java for Android, and then again in Objective-C/Swift for iOS. In the past, Dropbox and Slack had been implementing a strategy to share code between platforms, building a shared library in C++, until recently, when they decided to get rid of this.
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Google Open Sources its Cardboard VR Platform
Low-cost virtual reality (VR) platform Google Cardboard is now available as an open source project to let developers create new VR-powered apps and adapt existing ones to new devices. Google's announcement comes a few weeks after the discontinuation of its Daydream VR platform.
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Android NDK r21 Is the First NDK Release with Long Term Support
The latest NDK for Android, version r21, now available in beta, brings a number of significant changes, including Fortify being enabled by default, and newer versions of GNU Make and GDB. Additionally, starting with r21 Google will manage a new release process with a yearly Long Term Support (LTS) guarantee to provide users more stability.
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Facebook Releases AI Code Search Datasets
Facebook AI released a dataset containing coding questions paired with code-snippet answers, intended for evaluating AI-based natural-language code search systems. The release also includes benchmark results for several of Facebook's own code-search models and a training corpus of over 4 million Java methods parsed from over 24,000 GitHub repositories.
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Google Enables Continuous Testing Using the Android Emulator
The Android Emulator is the main tool Android developers use to test their apps. Google has just made integrating the Android Emulator within a continuous testing pipeline easier by open sourcing the Android Emulator Container Scripts and two related tools.
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How Chirp Audio QR Codes Went to the Moon and Back
Chirp uses audio to send and receive data using only a device's speaker and microphone. Recently, Chirp had a chance to test their technology by sending signals to the Moon. InfoQ has spoken with Daniel Jones, chief technology officer at Chirp, to learn more about Chirp codes.
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Android Studio 3.5 Aims to Be Faster and More Memory-Efficient
Coming at the end of an eight-month development cycle, Project Marble, the latest release of Android Studio, refrains from adding new major features and opts instead for improving performance and memory efficiency.
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Google Open-Sources Real-Time Hand Tracking for Android and iOS
Google has open-sourced a new component for its MediaPipe framework aimed to bring real-time hand detection and tracking to mobile devices.
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GeckoView and the New Firefox Preview for Android
Mozilla has recently released Firefox Preview to the Android Play store. It's a new iteration of the Firefox Mobile web browser that was built from scratch around GekcoView, an open-source web browsing component that is based on the Gecko browser engine
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Facebook Hermes May Significantly Reduce Boot-Time and Memory Usage in Android React Native Apps
Recently open-sourced by Facebook, JavaScript Engine Hermes aims to improve the performance of React Native Apps on Android devices, especially focusing on startup performance, download size, and memory consumption. Facebook claims are backed by initial benchmarking on Microsoft Office and Mattermost, an open source alternative to Slack.
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Scade Aims to Enable Android App Development Using Swift
Cross Platform Swift provides the foundation for cross-platform iOS and Android app development using Swift. Its 2019 roadmap focuses on achieving feature completeness, improving productivity and usability, and enhancing communication with the Swift development community.
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Capacitor 1.0 Aims to Improve the Creation of Hybrid, Web, and Native Apps
Capacitor, Ionic's new native API container aimed at creating iOS, Android, and Web apps using JavaScript, hit version 1.0. It attempts to bring a new take on how to build cross-platform apps that access native features.
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Flutter 1.5 Goes Multi-Platform, Includes Web Support
Announced as a technical preview at the latest Google I/O 2019 event, Flutter 1.5 aims to make it possible to create native applications for multiple platforms, including new form-factor devices, the Desktop, and the Web.
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Yelp Bento Aims to Simplify Modularized UI Development on Android
Yelp has open-sourced Bento, a framework to build modularized user interface on Android by combining different, reusable components into a single screen.
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Google Expands ML Kit, Adds Smart Reply and Language Identification
In a recent Android blog post, Google announced the release of two new Natural Language Processing (NLP) features for ML Kit, including Language Identification and Smart Reply. In both cases, Google is providing domain-independent APIs that help developers analyze and generate text, speak and other types of Natural Language text.