Using a build cache can speed up builds a great deal. Here’s a look at how to enable a build cache in Google Cloud Build.

Many CI services use an incrementing build number to identify builds. Google Cloud Build, however, uses a randomly assigned unique identifier, as is common in large scale systems. In this article we take a look at how to support incremented build numbers in Google Cloud Build.

Google Cloud Build is a Continuous Integration environment from Google Cloud that’s very flexible, and very affordable. In this post we look at how it can be used for Android projects.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a Google Pixelbook. I’ve been doing a bit of Android Development on it, mostly to optimize Pigment for Chromebooks. It’s taken some experimentation and discovery to find out how to get things set up, largely because the Android documentation is slightly out of date, so I thought I would share my experience, hopefully saving others time.

This post serves as a step by step guide to getting up and running with Android Studio on a Pixelbook (and, hopefully, other Chromebooks as well). I plan to write a full review once I’ve had some more time to kick the tires.

A few months ago I was tasked with rewriting the subscription code for Pigment, the coloring book app I work on at Pixite. Our users were suffering from a bug causing paying users to sometimes lose access to premium content, and the original implementation was somewhat hastily written, so I decided it made sense to invest the time to rewrite the billing code from scratch.

Play Billing Library

Google makes interacting with the Play Store’s in app billing infrastructure pretty easy with the Play Billing Library. This is a small library that manages a service connection with Google Play and takes care of some of the binding and threading concerns for you.

For a long time I’ve been in search of a good continuous integration server for Android. I’ve even written about one that I used years ago, which is no longer suited to Android development, in my opinion.

As the Android community has grown, so has the wealth of tools available. In that time I’ve also moved from simply wanting continuous integration, to wanting continuous delivery.

Continuous Delivery you say?

Continuous delivery builds on continuous integration, but instead of just testing your source code when you commit, it is also published to the appropriate channels. This takes the burden from the developer by automatically releasing a new version of the app any time changes are made, and also creates a reliable, repeatable release pipeline.

In a previous article introducing AutoValue, I briefly mentioned AutoValue Extensions. Now it’s time to go a bit more in depth to look at what extensions are, how they work, and how they can help you get even more out of AutoValue.

In my last article, I gave a basic introduction to AutoValue, the code generating annotation processor that makes immutable value types in Java easy. Now I’d like to take a bit of a deeper look at AutoValue and how it works.

Compile Time Annotation Processing

First things first, AutoValue is a compile time annotation processor. This means that it only runs when you compile your code, as opposed to when your app is running. This has a few implications for your app, namely that including AutoValue doesn’t significantly effect your application’s performance or size.

Value types in Java are hard. Well, not hard, but tedious. Google’s AutoValue library makes them much easier and has just received the long awaited update that adds the flexibility of extensions.

Value Types in Java

Before we can talk about how great AutoValue is, let’s look at the problem it solves: value types.

A value type is simply an immutable objects whose equality is based on property values, as opposed to identity. Think of a Money object:

There may be a shortage of love on the internet for AsyncTasks, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their uses. I’ve found myself using them a fair bit in the latest project that I’m working on. All in all, they make offloading tasks from the main thread quite simple, but can pose some challenges, particularly in tested environments.

The biggest challenge with using AsyncTask in tested code is that, since the code runs asynchronously, it can be difficult to ensure your tests get the right result for verification. I have seen some solutions for getting around this dilemma, but they involve pretty significant changes to the structure of your app, and exposing some internal members, simply for the sake of the tests.