Benjamin Weisss will show you how customizing views can help ease the development of responsive Android apps.

Watch this video to gain knowledge on when and how to write custom views and learn how to get rid of includes, merges, code duplication and other nasty things!

"Tell Don’t Ask”, Single Responsibility Principle, Separation of Concerns; such guidelines ride shotgun while we code, sitting on our shoulders and whispering in our ears.

Dinosaurs, like all living things, evolved slowly and gradually from previously existing creatures: the same happened with Listviews - they also evolved from pre-existing ancestors.

Dinosaurs didn’t spring suddenly into existence two hundred million years ago, huge, toothy, and hungry for grub. Listviews on Android have been around since the beginning, and they have been changing over the time. As you know, ListView is a fundamental component in Android, one of the most widely used widgets and also the most complex one.

In this talk, Jorge Barroso and Fernando Cejas explain the evolution of this widget from previous versions of Android (based on its source code), mistakes that have been made in its implementation, give examples, and show tips on how it should be used when developing cool Android applications.

Also covered in this talk are features, optimization, quirks and limitations of ListView.

New packaging configurations are appearing that use the Android OS - more correctly called accessories or APPcessories.

Some of these small, wearable and video dongles have accessories associated with them, like sensors. These innovations are being driven by compelling use cases within market sectors: healthcare, video distribution, education, maintenance, logistics, public services, fitness/wellness/sports to name but a few!

The mobile games industry of today is unrecognisable from that of just a few years ago: developers used to be able to rely on the quality of their apps to get them noticed, but with such incredible competition, app discovery and marketing has become as critical as the game itself in building a successful launch.

Industry data suggests that less than 40% of developers manage to break even with their app, and 80% of developers can’­t make a living purely from their app revenues. Yet new apps launch every day, and monster successes from Rovio, Supercell and King.com give developers and coders hope that they could have the next global smash hit.

The reality is far less glamorous. As this presentation will seek to show, launching an app requires a blend of skills and a keen business brain if an app is to have a chance of success.

The presentation will share a wealth of best practice, tips and tricks, data and insight into how to create and launch apps. It will also explain why the marketing of your app only starts with the launch, and why you need to be thinking long-term about keeping your app fresh and your users engaged if you are going to get them spending money.

Also covered are the key issues around mobile game marketing and discovery, the successes and failures in app marketing, and discussion of how indie developers can work smarter in an effort to compete with the big-spending publishers that often dominate the app stores.

Choosing the right identity provider (like Facebook, Twitter, PayPal or Google Plus) can be difficult and there are different scenarios where it makes more or less sense to implement them.

After watching this video, you will have a broad overview of this topic and should be able to provide your users with a nice experience.

Dennis Strein and Hans Kratz are the makers of the popular app AIDE - Android IDE, an integrated development environment for Android that runs on Android devices.

In this presentation, they will show how developers can use AIDE to develop a fully functional Android app using only their Android device, as well as how AIDE makes it easy for developers to switch back and forth between a PC dev environment (Android Studio or Eclipse) and AIDE for on-the-go development.

Plus, they give technical insights about the making of AIDE and show how they solved the technical challenges to get a complete scalable Android toolchain working on Android itself.

Do you know the #1 reason why customers uninstall apps? It's when they are frustrated with its performance.

If your app is functionally deficient, it just gets relegated to the background and you still have a chance to update your app and figure out a way to get him or her back. But research has shown that if users find their app behaving badly by draining power, crashing often, consuming too much bandwidth or just slowing down the system, they will uninstall it in a blink and you have lost them for life!

If developers had a good sense of how their app was behaving internally, as they have on how it behaves externally, many of these frustrations could be avoided.

While the Android framework provides a solid generic foundation for developers to write portable and robust applications, it's still common for application developers to reach limits (regarding either features, performance, or compatibility across API levels and platforms) where a generic framework doesn’t fulfil specific requirements.

However, thanks to its very open nature (and the NDK), Android as a platform gives developers the ability to implement custom frameworks, the same way the Android framework is built as a wrapper around low-level native components (e.g. skia, OpenMAX).

This video with Eric Hassold covers everything from extending BitmapFactory for advanced image decoding and processing (face detection, dominant colour detection, seam carving) for Flickr, to implementing a purely native highly efficient event based HTTP/HTTPS/SPDY network stack.

Wearable computing is turning out to be the next big thing. Most of the major players in the smartphone market are hurrying up to release smartwatches, wearable sensors, glasses, and a variety of the most diverse kinds of devices.

Launched in 2012 and based on a customized version of Android, the i’m Watch is one of the first smart watches available on the market, and the most complete feature-wise.

The video also briefly covers the libraries that will make your life easier and help you create outstanding apps for the i’m Watch.

XDK is a tool which allows you to develop your HTML5 applications and then package them for multiple stores available. You will find out what Intel is doing in the HTML5 space and how they can help you develop web apps and hybrid apps.

This is a “broad strokes” study (though with pointers to all the details) of an OCR-solution developed for Android, touching fun technologies such as JNI, OpenCV and Tesseract. Hooray!

For the last four years, Itude Mobile has developed on iOS and ported to Android, or developed on Android and ported to iOS, or something else. They've created a succesful method and toolset for that - watch the video to find out more!

Their strategy lets developers code native apps and then port efficiently without having to resort to html5 cross platform tools. The tried and tested iOS, JSF and Android libraries they use for this will become open source in Q4 2013.

Bonus: A kata in Clojure is at the end of the talk. That alone is worth a watch!

A black dress is an essential garment for many an occasion; and location is the essential data set for many a mobile application. But not all location data is the same.

So, how can developers ensure that they have the best data for their application?

He also covers the tools (Alljoyn, Adreno SDK and development kits) which are offered by Qualcomm to create unique 10 foot UI experiences.

Find out about 100% Indie and how they can help you promote your Android games and raise awareness through their website!

Plus, they give a demonstration, explanation, and code walkthrough of a second-screen WiDi demo - watch the video now!

They cover things like:

• Maintaining the device

• OpenIR (Open source IR HAL) as an example of a new feature

• What the formation of the new company means for the community developers

• Some examples of what additions were created from community contributions

Find out how they brought a more useable operating ROM to their users!

Smartphones are everywhere now – even in space!

A small team in Guildford, led by Dr Chris Bridges, launched a satellite – which includes a Nexus 1 – into low Earth orbit. Watch this Droidcon London keynote to learn about the journey from cradle to grave in Earth’s first of many ‘phone-sat’ projects, and how hardware and software challenges were overcome to achieve this scientific feat in teaching and research.

They’ll be going beyond the Android design guide to demonstrate what makes an app unique, walking you through their processes, giving advice on how teams can work together to achieve the best results, and showing you how to create a polished UI with delightful interactions and transitions!

As he was Ouya’s Android Specialist and helped them improve both software and firmware, there’s no one better to explain how to use it!

Despite Android becoming a major platform for mobile phones, no guidelines existed for designing homogeneous user experience across the entire platform – leading to companies re-using designs meant from other platforms, which lacked any Android-specific features. Fortunately, Google created HOLO, which quickly went mainstream as companies realised a proper Android design approach was essential.

Stephan Brunner covers the emergence of HOLO, the impact it had on the design philosophy of Runtastic, and how it improved Runtastic’s apps, as well as demonstrating how Runtastic’s designers create clean and easy mock-ups that inspire the rest of the team. Finally, you’ll learn how HOLO influenced Runtastic app design on other platforms – a valuable piece of information if you’re looking to expand!

If you want to learn how to create top-quality, easy-to-use apps by putting skeuomorphism on the shelf and using clean design elements, this is the ideal presentation for you!

Consistent, predictable app navigation is crucial to the user experience of your app, but the patterns and guidelines in the Android framework are easily misused or misunderstood – leading to a worse experience for the user.

In this Droidcon London video, Jeff Gilfelt from readyState Software explores how platform navigation mechanics have changed since the release of Android 3.0, demystify Tasks and the back stack, explain the subtleties and differences between Up and Back, look at common problems that occur when app navigation is poorly implemented, and demonstrate code techniques that will help you provide user-friendly navigation and is consistent within the platform.

If you are fascinated by the possibilities inherent in augmented reality, or inspired to develop applications to run on an exciting new platform, watch this video!

Epson has used its core technologies to develop binocular see-through smart glasses for the general public. And with a first concept product launched in late 2011, Epson can be considered as one of the pioneers of this exciting technology.

You will discover how both individual users and companies have been using Moverio to change the way we interact with technology and merge the real world with the digital to enhance reality.

Click play and learn what makes Moverio a natural platform for Augmented Reality and be excited by its potential.

He’ll demo his progress, talk about what it’s like to run a Kickstarter project, the challenges of developing a game simultaneously on Android and iOS, his involvement in the new OUYA Android-based TV console and why he went full circle from working for big companies back to bedroom coding.

If you’re thinking of going solo, starting a Kickstarter project, or just want to be a success in indie gaming, you should watch this video!

With the expansion in different Android devices, it’s no longer enough to design Android apps for just phone and tablet forms: apps on Android need to scale to a continuum of screen sizes, not just two.

Web apps have faced the same issue for years and are now designed to be responsive, meaning that they adapt intelligently to any screen size. All the best Android apps follow the same principles, and combined with Android’s powerful tools, apps can be built to support any device – find out how to get yours up to scratch!

If you need to improve your app security, this is the talk to come to – with 9 years experience, Scott Alexander-Bown will take you through all the tips and tricks to harden your Android app and make sure it’s safe for your users in this video from Droidcon London!

Last year, Firefox for Android was rebuilt from scratch to use Android’s UI framework instead of Mozilla’s XUL, improving its overall performance and user experience through a series of fast-paced development cycles.

Developed by the Google Android team, this innovative system displays the unique aspects of Gradle – come and discover the new features that have been developed and how you can use them with other platforms like Javascript, Scala, Java, and C++.

For the past 14 years Havok has been creating middleware and tools specifically for games. What started off as a Physics engine pushed them to Animation, Destruction, AI and Graphics. Now released in 2013 is a tool set called Project Anarchy aimed at mobile app developers, is free for iOS, Android and Tizen.

The tool contains a large amount of the Havok tools including Havok Physics, Havok Animation, Havok AI and Havok Vision - watch this video to find out more!

Find out how to successfully negotiate the long and rocky road of ensuring your Android enterprise devices do what they are bought to do!

“eHealth is seen by some as possibly the most important revolution in healthcare since the advent of modern medicine,” – Dr Rhonda Jolly, Australian Policy Online

With the massive adoption and proliferation of Android devices across the globe, a diminishing number of medical professionals per capita, and a long term goal of providing Star Trek-esque medical aid, there’s a big opportunity for Android to play a role in revolutionising the healthcare industry.

As Australia is rolling out its fledgling eHealth system, countries around the world are either preparing to roll out their own systems or desperately trying to catch up to speed to accommodate increased demand – facing many political, resourcing, privacy, and security hurdles as they do so.

This talk aims to provide awareness of common issues, mitigations, and methodologies particular to the healthcare domain and Android and to inspire attendees to take advantage of the many opportunities present there.

To keep up with the Android eco-system, you have to deliver updates at a rapid pace without losing out on quality. Square is a company that excels in this through their code structure – watch this Droidcon London video to see concrete usage examples of their open source libraries (such as Dagger, Otto, Picasso, Retrofit, and OkHttp) to learn how they do it!

The Eclipse M2M (Machine-to-Machine) open source initiative delivers a stack of open source building blocks that accelerate the development of connected solutions.

Plus, there's discussion of the challenges of operating large fleets of M2M devices, and the need for cloud-based scalable infrastructures. So if that sounds like your area, watch Benjamin Cabé’s talk now!

You’ll be given an overview of the different technologies that can be used to bring Android to the standard of Java, combining well-known tools like Jenkins, Maven and Sonar with Lint, Robolectric or UIAutomator. If you want to make your app better all round, don’t miss this talk by two of OCTO Technology's experts!

Google Glass is a massive scale social experiment. The first heads up display that has the potential for mass adoption. Most of us are old enough to remember the “elitist” moniker of the mobile phone when it first went commercial, the yuppy accessory in the City, now used globally by billions.

70% of 300 online business leaders surveyed by Dave Slocombe recently believe there is a high level of confusion around the potential of wearable technology and the majority also agreed that both enterprise and startup alike should be assessing this new and disruptive paradigm.

In today’s world of hackers and security breaches, it’s essential that developers make their users as safe as possible. One piece of “low-hanging fruit” for data security is to use SQLCipher for Android, a near drop-in replacement for SQLite offering transparent AES-256 encryption of data and metadata.

Games are becoming more and more social and focused on multiplayers; gamers now want a device that they can use to play with the community, not just alone. In this Droidcon London talk, three experts from Nuggeta show you why this means you need to develop cross-platform games!

Watch a social cross platform multiplayer game demonstrated and discover what’s been developed at Nuggeta. You’ll learn how to empower your Android game by using a game data definition langage, so you can get the best from the cross platform game framework without having to redefine your legacy data format protocol. You’ll also find about the launch of their powerful new plugin that empowers the Google Game Services API.

This is an animated session with 3 speakers who are all experts in the gaming industry and development – click play now!

Clients don’t get Android. Soho agencies really don’t get Android. They seem to think that if you take an iPhone app and stick an Android badge on it, then you’re done. But users are smarter than that these days, and they want, and deserve, and demand better.

This Droidcon London talk will give you the confidence to stand up to your client and tell them where they’re wrong, where their design agency’s wrong, and show them that you really know how to make a proper native Android app and convince them to trust you and come along for the ride.

It’s your absolute duty as an Android professional to help your client by correcting them in this way – but of course you can’t say that without some serious supporting foundation and of course no fear of being fired – but that’s another story.

So you'll hear about Android design patterns, Android anti-patterns, and how to add those little flourishes that surprise and delight your users; where to obey Google guidelines, and where to deviate; and how to work with designers and product owners to mould their original vision into a proper native Android app that sits comfortably in its little green robot home.

Kenton will be illustrating this talk with his experiences developing BBC Weather and Summly this year. Within a month of release, BBC Weather became the BBC’s third most popular Android app after iPlayer and News, its highest-rated Android app with a rating of 4.7 and the ratio of 5* to 1* reviews at over 100 to 1, with users raving about its native Android credentials.

It became the fifth app he’s worked on to be featured by Google on Play Store. Summly was famously sold to Yahoo who immediately closed down the iPhone app and shuttered the Android app days before its release, but it’s still worth using it as an example of how to take a great iPhone app and make an even better Android app from it.

More sensors mean more opportunities for “intelligent” applications that detect changes in their environment and adapt accordingly.

While modern Android phones are equipped with a wide range of sensors, capturing data from machines in the environment already equipped with specific sensors multiplies the possibilities. This talk makes a case for sensor fusion between the Android phone sensors and the sensors provided by an ordinary passenger car.

In this video, Gabor presents an application that processes data from the phone’s accelerometer, compass and gyroscope sensors plus the car’s speed sensor and integrates the result with internet-based services such as Google Maps. Be inspired by this Droidcon London video to start thinking about a platform for supporting these car applications!

The stock Android emulator being known to be slow and difficult to setup, many Android developers don’t use it and prefer to directly test their applications on real devices. But it's still difficult to test apps on different Android versions and device resolution/DPIs. Thus, Genymotion was developed to provide Android developers and people demonstrating apps with a fast and easy to setup Android emulator.

Watch Daniel Fages show how Genymotion can help developers save time on apps testing and help demonstrators make great presentation of their products. With more than 3000 daily registered users, Genymotion is greatly appreciated by Android developers.

In this presentation, Daniel Fages:

• Explains Genymotion architecture

• Demonstrates how Genymotion can be used for apps testing and presentation

• Shows how Genymotion can be integrated with testing and CI tools

• Unveils new exciting features

Over the past few years, the quality of apps in the Google Play Store has increased substantially. Developers are taking Android UI seriously and producing beautiful apps made of tons of graphics resources (Bitmaps, 9-patches, shapes, etc.) every day. To help you avoid the pain of handling all these different resources, the Drawable abstraction was born.

In this video, Cyril Mottier deep dives into the android.graphics.drawable package and how you can use it to render scalable and responsive UIs. The Drawable notion is essential to the creation of UIs, but developers often only scratch the surface. Click play to understand Drawables and be able to use them to create clean code and a polished, smooth app!

This talk shows the process of creating 3D content for Android using a number of open source tools: Blender to create 3D content, Gimp to create textures and Rajawali to bring it to life using the Android SDK.

Rajawali is a 3D framework for Android based on OpenGL ES 2.0 and written in pure Java which abstracts all the complicated OpenGL bits.

This presentation will also benefit people who are unfamiliar with 3D: Dennis Ippel goes over the basics, as well as cover optimisation, common techniques used in 3D, animation and interaction.

It’s no secret that concurrency is a hard problem to solve. Yet, even in 2013, we’re only beginning to make larger strides towards programming models that drastically simplify dealing with concurrency – and most of the time, this is happening in the server side world.

If you look at your average Android app, however, you will notice that it’s highly concurrent: screens are backfilled with data coming from web services, the local database, or both. The UI needs to reflect changes to the data model, so handling concurrent messages is a task left to the developer.

Matthias Kappler believes that right now on Android, dealing with concurrency is too hard, and by extension too error prone. Luckily, Netflix has recently started to bring .NET’s “Reactive Extensions”/Rx to the Java platform, enabling developers to write asynchronous, message based applications using functional reactive programming.

At SoundCloud, they’ve taken Rx out of the server space and into the clients, in order to make writing highly concurrent Android apps a breeze.

The need for root exploits to gain full control of Android systems gives attackers easy to use tools which can be included in malware – you could pack an existing exploit into an app in as few as three hours!

To harden Android devices for enterprise usage, zertisa is developing a multi-boot Android system based on Linux containers. By design, this abstraction layer does not offer more security – exploits that run in one container can easily infect the host system, and breaking out of the container is only a matter of mounting the right partition. So, how do you solve this problem?

To securely use such a system, Janosch Maier will propose the following:

• Each container uses its own kernel to prevent the spreading of root-kits between containers

• The containers use SEAndroid policies to complicate the use of root-exploits to break out

• Each container is encrypted to complicate physical attacks

• The use of SEAndroid promises the best increase of security. Though such measures are essential to prevent container break-outs, their use is not limited to dual boot solutions, and luckily are by now merged into the Android AOSP.

Find out how to apply these methods and fully protect your app - watch this video from Droidcon London now!

There are an increasing number of apps that come with great design nowadays, and most of the carefully crafted apps resonate with Android users due to their great and consistent User Experience (UX) design.

Many developers and designers try hard to create an app with great UX by largely referring to the Android Design Guideline; however, to make remarkable UX design is certainly more than that, and often they miss certain important items from their check list.

If you want to check that your app(s) is heading the right direction to awesomeness, watch this Droidcon London video to find out more about the advanced check list in making awesome Android apps.

Vertu is a UK-based manufacturer and retailer of luxury mobile phones. Established by Nokia in 1998, it spent the next fourteen years creating phones using the S40 and S60 platforms. In 2012, they introduced their first Android phone with the Vertu Ti. This video from their Droidcon London session discusses their experiences productising Android along with the benefits and pitfalls in creating an Android phone that will be used around the world.

Topics include:

• Discussions of what sorts of issues any Android OEM would face, such as dealing with an ever-changing Google Mobile Services and moving from one Android baseline to another

• Specific challenges that Vertu met, such as adding extra physical buttons, unique services integration, and selling in China where Google Mobile Services aren’t allowed

• The trade-offs between using an existing analytics platform and creating one from scratch.

We’ve all been there and done that. A project starts small, and all of a sudden turns into a two-headed monster.

What if you could break it (your project and not the monster) down by functionality, into smaller self-contained services that allowed you to develop, test and deploy without interfering with the rest of your other services?

“You’re telling me fibs!” you say? Then watch this video to find out about the secrets of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and show you how to build robust, scalable and lean services that provide incredible functionality as well as being very low maintenance.

Marcos shares his experiences with using such approaches, and tell you the pros (and cons) with doing things this way, as well as taking you through some common tools that can be used to make you sail through that ginormous Android enterprise application you’ve been working on with common dialects such as JSON, REST, HTTP and message queues.

If this sounds like a familiar problem, watch this video of Marcos Placona's talk at Droidcon London now!

Trying to implement the same functionality on different devices, OS versions, manufacturers etc. can be more eventful than it should.

This Droidcon London talk is a guide about how you can achieve your task at hand without compromising code quality and readability.

Designing an elegant interface and local APIs for developers to communicate with your Android app is crucial for building a platform around your product: in this talk, you’ll find out how to allow third party developers to seamlessly interact with the users’ local data and shortcut more expensive server operations.

Ty Smith from Evernote walks you through how to create a well-defined interface in your app – if that’s something you want to know, watch the video from Droidcon London now!

Today, building the next generation of mobile apps and scaling them to create success requires leading edge platforms and infrastructure.

In this video of Mandy Waite's Droidcon London session, she looks at how you can use Google Cloud Platform to build highly scalable mobile backends.

Using a sample application and live demos, she shows you how applications built on Google App Engine and Compute Engine can make use of Google Cloud Endpoints and Google Cloud Messaging to provide all that’s needed to allow Android devices to access backend services in the Cloud.

So if you want to take advantage of Google’s Cloud platform, watch the video now!

In the vision of the Web of Things, embedded devices become first-class citizens of the Web - but what if everyday objects could become part of this gigantic network? What if your watch, guitar, bike or bottle of organic iced-tea could all have an active digital identity on the Web? With the advent of tagging technologies such as NFC, EPC or QR-codes, this is becoming a reality with a lot of potential for simple but great innovations.

In this talk, Dominique Guinard looks at these three tagging technologies comparing and contrasting them in order to understand their respective use-case based on our experience deploying such solutions in the real-world.

Then, put on your Android hat and look at how much of a fantastic Web of Things platform Android truly is! Watch Dominique implement a mobile application that can read both NFC and QR tags on products in order to bootstrap the access to their virtual profiles.

Looking at event “better” connected things, he also introduces the Microbridge Android library, Google’s ADK (Accessory Development Kit) standard and the Processing IDE for Arduino and show how this combination lets your phone talk with any real-world device (did someone say toaster?), as well as a glimpse into the future and a look at Bluetooth Low Energy support on mobile phones.

Finally, he shows how mobile phones can be used as physical gateways to cloud services such as the EVRYTHNG API, where Droids, bottles, toasters and Large Hadron Colliders can meet to talk Web of Things!”

Picture the scene. The end of football season is fast approaching. As the matches enter injury time, fans in stadia across the country look down nervously at their smartphones, eager to find out how their rivals are performing and if their club has secured promotion or even avoided relegation. That is if they can get a data connection.

Mobile connectivity is notoriously poor in football stadia due to their construction and the high density of users. Yet, football fans increasingly expect the same level of connectivity and access to services that they experience elsewhere. Stephen Naicken's proposed solution – sharing content and data connections betweens fans’ smartphones using a delay tolerant network (DTN) implemented on Android smartphones with WiFi-Direct.

In association with Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, they designed and deployed an Android application to allow users’ smartphones to form networks that are used to share and request content, such as live scores and Twitter. Users without mobile network connectivity were able to continue using services via the DTN, whilst those with an Internet connection were able to download and share content with others.

The primary focus of this Droidcon London talk is on the design and implementation of the DTN, the many technical issues that were overcome (particularly with Wifi-Direct and device dependent issues), and the practical issues of deploying a WiFi-Direct based application in the real world.

We all want a simpler, smarter app; however, trying to amaze with cutting-edge technologies can be difficult and lead to unpredictable experiences.

Starting with an experiment with Elastic Search and continuing to a prototype integrating real-time image recognition, you will learn about their experiences and the effects this had on their 1 million Android users.