After all the scandal caused by Cambridge Analytica and considering the role Facebook had in it, people went crazy about the personal information companies are collecting about them. Many users revoked permissions from applications or removed applications that they’re not using.

Google began sending emails notifying about the coming changes in the Google Play Store policy. Starting from November 1, 2018, every app uploaded as a new application or an update of a previously launched app has to target Android Oreo (API level 26) or higher.

Android has a whopping 85.9-percent share in the mobile OS market. Even if you’re an iPhone enthusiast yourself, these numbers can’t be argued with – Google’s operating system is an extremely important part of the modern technology landscape.

The last 20% of developing an Android mobile app is 80% of the work. That is what the Pareto principle tells us. This last 20% is making the app store page so beautiful that users who find it install your app. That’s where app store optimisation comes in. Using research on how users navigate through app stores, you can improve download rate of your app drastically. This process is called App Store Optimisation, or ASO for short.

For years, Java has been the standard for developing Android apps. In 2011, JetBrains presented Kotlin, a new statically-typed language running on Java Virtual Machine. In 2017, during Google I/O, Kotlin was announced as an official language for Android development. As Kotlin is a modern programming language with powerful features, it gained popularity among Android developers. It was placed second on the list of the most loved programming languages in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018.

The Android platform is periodically updated, which means a new version is released every now and then. When a new iteration is available, the question that arises among the owners of Android products and in the Android developer community is: “should I update my mobile application?” The answer is not straightforward, as there are both good reasons to do it, and good reasons to wait. In this article, I will help you make the right decision on when and how to update your application to deal with a new version of Android.

On 17 May 2017, Google announced their first-class support for Kotlin, which means that Kotlin became an official language for Android app development. Since then, JetBrains proved that Kotlin can also be successfully used for writing iOS apps – the official app of KotlinConf 2017 was built entirely in Kotlin and supported iOS, Android as well as most browsers via its web app. With the growing support for both major mobile platforms Kotlin is bound to gain in popularity, and its future seems not to be confined only to Android. You might have heard about Kotlin and asked what it is and whether it is worth choosing this technology over Java for Android mobile development. This article was written to provide answers to these questions - and more.

Video chats are implemented in a great many applications. Facebook’s Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Google Hangouts, or Slack – they all have it. If you want to follow their steps and implement a video chat in your application, you might encounter some problems. Most of them are paid solutions that only use their provider’s servers. That’s why I created VideoChatGuru, an open-source solution accessible to anyone who wants to have a video chat in their app.

The most frequently googled questions about Android programming are: Why is Android development hard? and Why is Android development so complicated? All in all, developing an Android app doesn't have to be more complicated than any other app. There are a lot of things that you have to keep in mind, but with the tips presented in the article, you can make the process effortless.

In May 2017, the Android team at Google announced first-class support for Kotlin, a statically typed programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Kotlin is built by JetBrains, who (it is worth noting) is also responsible for developing the JetBrains IntelliJ Java IDE, which Google’s own Android Studio is based on.