The Android OS is famous with it’s many customization capabilities. This gives us the opportunity to experiment as much as we want. We can change the look and feel of the OS, or we can dive deeper and tinker with things like GPU, CPU and other scary abbreviations. But before getting our hands dirty, we need to do something else. We need to root our phone first. What is rooting? Long story short, to root your phone means to get all the privileges, permissions and goodies of an admin user....

Often, when we develop applications, we have to transfer data from one Activity to another. Of course, we can not do that directly. The data we want to transfer must be included into a corresponding Intent object. And if we want to move a complex POJO (e.x. Person, Car, Employee, etc.) we also need to perform some additional actions to make that object suitable for a transfer. To do that, our object must be either Serializable or Parcelable....

With each and every new version of Android, more and more features are included into the OS. The apps become more flexible and user-friendly. Both users and developers can experiment and try new features and configurations. Of course, these boundaries can not be pushed without improving the actual tools used for developing the applications. Thus, our beloved Android Studio is evolving as well! Many bugs were fixed and new features were introduced with version 2....

Not long ago, the iOS users were introduced to a new feature called 3D Touch. What this feature does is to provide a limited list of actions that you can do without entering an app. Of course, the folks from Google were ready to respond to that. Thus, the App Shortcuts feature was included in Android 7.1.1 What are App shortcuts? The main idea behind App Shortcuts is not different than the one behind the 3D Touch....

Android 7.0 (Nougat) brought plenty of new features to both average users and developers. Alongside features like Multi-window view, Notification Direct Reply and File-based Encryption something called Direct Boot was included as well. Although, it doesn’t sound like a game changer, it still can have a huge impact on the user satisfaction. Using this new feature with creativity and responsibility can result in better applications. But what exactly is the idea behind Direct Boot?...