With the ever-increasing demand for Android applications, developers depend more and more on specialized tools to speed up the development process, as well as enhance efficiency. Here are some of the lesser-known but still very useful tools for Android development.
Booster
Booster is quite an interesting Android developer’s tool because it’s an extensible, powerful, lightweight, and easy-to-use quality optimization tool. It is specially made for mobile application development, for example, like redwerk.com/services/mobile-application-development/. The tool’s primary goal is solving quality problems as the app increases in complexity in terms of package size, stability, and performance.
Booster provides various modules for system bug fixing, resource compression, redundant resources reduction, resource index inline, multithreading optimization, performance detection, and others. This tool can increase stability by 15 to 20 per cent, and reduce package size by 1 to 10 MB.
Shake
For developers looking for a tool to detect bugs, explore steps in reproducing a bug, and gather video or screenshots of bugs, Shake is one of the best out there. It makes developers’ lives easier when working with bugs, either in beta or production stage.
By shaking the device, a template for sending a bug report will pop up. Users can then mark the bug and describe the issue before sending it to the developers.
AndroidUtilCode
AndroidUtilCode is an easy-to-use, yet quite a powerful library for Android, which encapsulates commonly used functions in Android development and having complete unit and demo tests. Development efficiency can be significantly improved by using the encapsulated APIs of AndroidUtilCode.
AndroidUtilCode is composed of two modules. The first module is often used in development and is called utilcode. The other one, subutil, is used to simplify the main module but is not typically used in development.
Can I Drop Jetifer?
All Android developers know how challenging it can be to migrate to AndroidX coming from old support libraries, especially for huge legacy projects. The migration’s success is heavily reliant on the use of Jetifer, which is used to convert dependencies that are still dependent on old artifacts when operating on AndroidX classes. The problem is, this setup adds to the build time.
As more libraries get migrated to AndroidX, Jenifer won’t need to be enabled at some point. The Can I Drop Jetifer plugin can identify which libraries need migrating to AndroidX.
GloballyDynamic
GloballyDynamic is composed of specialized tools that make Dynamic Delivery available universally, no matter what the underlying distribution platform (e.g. Google App Store) is. It also provides a single, unified client API for Android as well as a streamlined experience for developers.
The distribution platform currently supported by GloballyDynamic are:
- Play Feature Delivery by Google Play Store
- Dynamic Ability by Huawei App Gallery
- Most other platforms via GloballyDynamic Server such as Firebase App Distribution, Samsung Galaxy Store, Amazon App Store, and local development.
Scabbard
For developers using Dagger 2, an injection framework for compile-time Android dependency, visualizing, and understanding the dependency graph can be daunting. Fortunately, there is a Scabbard. A tool that can be used to visualize scopes, component relationships, dependency graphs, and entry points. Minimal effort is required from the developer by including it in the project.
The scabbard is so well-integrated with IntelliJ or Android Studio, as well as Gradle that developers can easily view @Component or @Subcomponent graphs coming directly from the source code using gutter icons.
Autoplay
For Gradle users who want their Android artifacts published on Google Play, the Autoplay plugin can help. This tool is a simple alternative to Fastlane or Gradle Play Publisher.
Applications can be published as App Bundle or apk. Autoplay is future-proof, reliable, developer-friendly, and CI/CD usage optimized.
MNML
Pronounced as ‘minimal’, MNML is a simple and free Android screen recorder. Although there are already many tools and apps that allow screen recording functionality, with newer devices having their own built-in ones, MNML is still an excellent resource for developers who want to learn or just check how such an app is implemented.
There are other tools out there just waiting to be explored, and some are very specific to certain tasks. The ones listed above may not be well-known as mainstream application developers’ tools, but they can help developers work on their projects faster while increasing application efficiency.
