Philosophical Hacker

Activitys and Fragments, perhaps by some strange historical accidents, have been seen as the optimal building blocks upon which we can build our Android applications for much of the time that Android has been around. Let’s call this idea – the idea that Activitys and Fragments are the best building blocks for our apps – “android-centric” architecture. This series of posts is about the connection between the testability of android-centric architecture and the other problems that are now leading Android developers to reject it; it’s about how our unit tests are trying to tell us that Activitys and Fragments – like the cracking bricks in the above image – don’t make the best building blocks for our apps because they tempt us to write code with tight coupling and low cohesion. »

We as engineers somewhere have a level somewhere where everything beneath that is a black box… Jake Wharton, Fragmented Episode 7, 1:12:00 For a while now, anything security or crypto related on Android has been a black box for me. For example, when I read the docs on Android’s KeyStore class or hear about Android’s Fingerprint authentication functionality on Fragmented, I often feel like I’m just barely understanding what’s being said. »

A few weeks ago, the folks working on Kotlin announced the 1.1 release. Kotlin’s 1.1 release has experiment support for coroutines. Here’s the elevator pitch for coroutines from their blog post announcing the release: Asynchronous programming is taking over the world, and the only thing that is holding us back is that non-blocking code adds considerable complexity to our systems. Kotlin now offers means to tame this complexity by making coroutines first-class citizens in the language through the single primitive: suspending functions. »

Activitys and Fragments, perhaps by some strange historical accidents, have been seen as the optimal building blocks upon which we can build our Android applications for much of the time that Android has been around. Let’s call this idea – the idea that Activitys and Fragments are the best building blocks for our apps – “android-centric” architecture. This series of posts is about the connection between the testability of android-centric architecture and the other problems that are now leading Android developers to reject it; it’s about how our unit tests are trying to tell us that Activitys and Fragments don’t make the best building blocks for our apps because they force us to write code with tight coupling and low cohesion. »

Someone recently asked me how I “know so much” about testing android apps. After disabusing them of the notion that I know a lot about testing, I said that I’d write up a blog post of some helpful resources I’ve found and send it to them. This is that blog post. The resources are divided into books, articles, talks, and podcasts. I’ve marked resources that I think are essential with a “*”. »

Activitys and Fragments, perhaps by some strange historical accidents, have been seen as the optimal building blocks upon which we can build our Android applications for much of the time that Android has been around. Let’s call this idea – the idea that Activitys and Fragments are the best building blocks for our apps – “android-centric” architecture. This series of posts is about the connection between the testability of android-centric architecture and the other problems that are now leading Android developers to reject it; it’s about how our unit tests are trying to tell us that Activitys and Fragments don’t make the best building blocks for our apps because they force us to write code with tight coupling and low cohesion. »

Korean Translation by Jihyok KIM God is dead…and also Context is dead. –Friedrich Nietszche (probably) Godlessness in the context of OO-programming – unlike godlessness in a broader context – is uncontroversially a good thing. Some may want gods in school or gods in government, but – all other things being equal – no one really wants gods in their programs. In android development specifically, we have a god that we all know and love to hate: Context. »

As a profession, we also tend to be abysmally ignorant of our own history. David West, Object Thinking Almost two years ago, I wrote a couple articles that attempted to answer the question, “Why is testing Android apps so hard?” In those posts, I suggested that the standard architecture of Android applications is what makes testing difficult. This explanation of the difficulty of testing android apps raises a deeper, more historical question: why did an architecture that makes testing difficult became the default way of building Android apps in the first place? »

Imagine for a moment that there’s an annoying fly buzzing around your guests at a BBQ you’re hosting. You and your guests swat at it a few times, but no one manages to nail the sucker. You run into the house to grab a fly swatter, but you find that even if you wait for the fly to settle down somewhere, you can’t quite smash it. Frustrated and desperate, you decide to evacuate the party (and the state), get your hands on a nuke, and nuke the fly along with your backyard and neighborhood. »

More than 1000 apps…they have espresso tests for the first time using the test recorder…espresso adoption has also grown since the introduction of [the espresso test recorder]. Android Developers Backstage, Episode 37 Espresso Test Recorder, 31:10 Record-playback tools are almost always a bad idea for any kind of automation, since they resist changeability and obstruct useful abstractions. They are only worth having as a tool to generate fragments of scripts which you can then edit as a proper programming language… »