Network security has seen a huge update in terms of securing HTTPS/TLS connections safely. Without the need for code changes you can use the new Network Security Config to prevent accidental clear text communications, limit who you trust and more.

There’s also a new method to verify the presence and contents of a hardware-backed Keystore, which is the prefered way to create, store, and use cryptographic keys on Android devices. The hardware KeyStore is useful as it guards against extraction on rooted devices.

Are your .apk files going to be more secure with apk signing schema v2? Scott will explore what this is and what it means for your existing apps.

Device storage permission gets more granular with scoped directory access. Also starting in Android N, when the device is powered on it can boot into a new mode called Direct Boot. Do you need to make your app Direct Boot aware? What’s the difference between credential protected storage and device protected storage?

But what if your minSDK isn't 24? Come to this talk to get a concise update on the new features, practical tips and examples of how to implement in your app today!

This talk is meant to be a higher-level overview into general QA process; it is not meant to be a highly technical dive into automation tools and unit tests. A general list of topics Derek and Kirk plan to cover are listed below:

• Thinking outside happy path

• Thinking about every entrance into a view both within the app and from outside app (deeplinks versus in-app navigation)

• Thinking about different use cases; ie: someone in the app for a LONG time versus someone who opens it for 30 seconds once a day

• Thinking about which devices are supported; size classes, OS levels, screen resolutions, hardware capabilities, etc

• Thinking about externalities; network conditions, power levels, server endpoints 404’ing, null (or unexpected) data

• Data persistence, data mutation, data stabilities

• Upgrade testing - different upgrade paths, Database migrations

• Permissions (Mainly Android M +)

• Repeated testing; ie: Verifying data race conditions aren’t an issue

• Developing an appreciation for Ad-Hoc testing (ie: Before release always have a feeling like you are missing something and take an extra 15 minutes)

• Developing a hatred for Ad-Hoc testing (non-rigorous testing)

• Checklists, and why you should use them

Introduced in Marshmallow, as the shy guy that was allowed to step in only when your device went to sleep. ZzzZzzzz

With the new N release, Doze mode becomes the rockstar. He rushes into the room with a big shabang by shooting all background services and network requests that forgot to get away.

He should no longer be shy. He just shoots and dances on bones of your scheduled alarms, while you wonder why this particular task is no longer running. With the new Doze mode, you require to adapt your app architecture to the new reality.

On this talk, you will learn how to survive Doze mode using Job Scheduler, Content Provider and stay in one piece.

Unfortunately though, among many of the problems that we carry over from the past years, the loathed, dreadful, why-in-the-name-of-Andy-Rubin limit of 65536 methods is the most notable of them.

This talk focuses on analyzing this “condition” from a pragmatic and down-to-earth perspective for developers. You will get to understand what exactly this problem is about and why it exists in the first place. Moreover, we will go through the possible solutions, each one of them presented with pros and cons. At the end of this talk, you should be able to evaluate which solution best suits your app, and even if you need a solution in the first place.

During this session you will explore these new tools for building complex and efficient layouts. Huyen will go through an example of using the new Layout Editor in conjunction with the ConstraintLayout, you will learn how to use the Layout Inspector to analyze view hierarchies, discuss when to use the ConstraintLayout, and explore good practices and current caveats.

Alex will deep dive into the features that you can start using right away in your project, like lambda expressions and method references, with real world Android specific examples.

He will also explore other Java 8 features like streams and default methods. While currently the support for the latter is more restricted (only from Nougat onwards), these are really powerful features that you will want to master.

Of course, Alex will also go over what you need to do in your project configuration to support Java 8 features and what are some of the issues you may need to be aware of.

In this talk, you will explore the more than 15 technologies in Firebase that help you build applications, grow your user base, and earn money from your hard work. You'll take a lap around the platform, looking in detail at each of these technologies -- everything from a realtime database, to remote configuration, to identity, to analytics and more. You will also discover some of the technologies that will help you grow your app once you've developed and deployed it -- such as App Indexing, which keeps your app in front of users when they search for content!

Ultimately, we get paid to solve business and user problems, not to be perfectionists.

Should the product vision affect your development practices? Could you be delivering perfectly valid, beautiful code that solves the wrong problem?

At ustwo we work with all sorts clients, from startups to multinationals, giving us an amazing opportunity to see these issues from a variety of different angles. We like to share our experience but also hear everyone else's.

Join us at the App Garage Clinics!

Excited? Make sure you have a look at each App Garage Clinic's entry requirements. Check out the links below and be involved! You might also win some awesome prizes!

The App Garage Clinics will take place in the balcony located upstairs on Thursday 27th October from 2pm to 5pm - check out each Clinic's page for the exact timings and all info!

App Garage - Performance Clinic

App Garage - Design Clinic

In the talk, Francisco will share his experience on how to architect your view and your business logic layers to support complex UX cases, all while respecting the Android lifecycle. He will also cover which Observable operators work for common UI challenges like updating and listening to RecyclerViews, transactions like drag and drop, time-sensitive animations, keeping an operation alive through rotation, or making easy input dialogs. These concepts are introduced alongside some important functional patterns: reducing state, embracing immutability, stateless UI components, operation algebras, and how to make your existing code reactive.

Lastly, a rundown of some helper libraries, talks, and books, to further your FRP skills.

You will discover things such as (breaking the) test Rules, (outrunning the) test Runners and how to make most of tools such as Espresso & the Cloud Test Lab.

Experimenting is a pretty common process in established companies and popular startups but it is still rare to see smaller teams adopting it. Whether you are a designer or a developer, a 100 or a 5 person team, experimenting is a great way to trust your decisions and to iterate quickly.

In this talk you will see why experiments are valuable. Then you will explore the life of an experiment, from the hypothesis through to results. Finally you will discover why mobile is a challenging medium and how to successfully put in place a good experimentation workflow.

In developing nations where the next billions user are, things like network conditions and types of devices available are quite different when compared to developed nations. One has to factor in aggressive optimization techniques to ensure that consumption of resources is kept low.

In this talk Amrit will share with you some of the optimizations that you can do to your apps to perform better in NBU regions and provide delightful experiences to your users.

Starting with design thinking and ending with a user-tested prototype, a Product Design Sprint orients the team and effort toward a mutual goal and improves the changes of making something people want.

After this talk you’ll be armed with the tools you need to rapidly generate potential solutions to your customer’s problems, effectively scope an MVP, create a prototype, and get user feedback; all within a week!

Martino Luca "Facebook Infer: A static analyzer for catching bugs before you ship"

Florina Muntenescu "Optimising The Performance Of VectorDrawables"

Tania Pinheiro "7 Ways to improve your Gradle build"

Carlo Marinangeli and Evelina Vrabie - Battle of Immutables: AutoValue vs Lombok

Andy Piper - Supercharging your Android app release with fastlane

David Gonzales - How to be the only Android Developer in your team and Still Have Fun

Brendan Fahy - Getting to know the Zendesk support SDK

Pierrick Caen and Alexandra Tritz - Rethinking BlaBlaCar's app architecture

Andrew Lord "Lambda Expressions - An Overview for Android Developers"

Francisco Estevez "Write a Lib Today!"

Darryl Bayliss "iOS For Android Developers"

In this talk you will start from the Data Binding basic concepts and then will discover how to use it to improve the architecture of a typical Android application applying the Model View ViewModel pattern. Using this pattern you need to write less code to create an app that can be easily tested using JVM and instrumentation tests.

The demo project is available here.

Facebook engineering is all about scale. Marco and Balasz will introduce you to their development processes and sometime unintuitive or unorthodox technical solutions to cope with their unique scale of users, engineers and codebase.

This is so awesome for multiple reasons, The best one is its ability to run on Mobile. Mohamed will be sharing with you how the the Android TensorFlow example works, and what are the things that can you do with it.

Join Mohamed and discover how to work with Tensorflow on Android platform, what is a machine/Deep learning (especially the google's Tensorflow), and how to implement it in an android project.

Find out more on TensorFlow here and here.

This talk will focus on the Google Cardboard and the Unity game engine. It will highlight the main characteristics and advantages of a VR app and the challenges posed by evolving in a VR environment. These include cybersickness, lifelike interactions and single button control.

The new VR features such as Google Daydream will also be discussed as a hint of what the future of VR could be.

In this session, you'll discover what's needed to bring your Android app to the living room: you’ll dive into all the tools required to create high performing Media Streaming apps and understand how to take advantage of the big TV screen while using new UI/UX patterns for app navigation through the remote, and how to run your first Android App for TV on Amazon Fire TV.

With so much important content to cover, it's impossible to describe it within the confines of such a tiny abstract, especially since I'm not being paid to write it. Suffice it to say that it will be ground-breaking, mind-blowing, and paycheck-boosting, and that few will regret, nor many remember, what we did there that day (arguably because of what happened in the pub later).

This talk will start with a brief introduction into Kotlin and its core language features. After this brief foray into concepts like Kotlin's immutable variables, null behaviour and other smarts like the syntactic sugar it provides for dealing with types and properties you'll discover what's in store for Android developers.

Particularly noteworthy are the decrease in annoying Java boilerplate code, fewer of the irritating "Process has stopped unexpectedly" messages and the easily available Kotlin Android Extensions. You will also explore the toolchain and compiler tools Kotlin provides for Android development, the differences to using Kotlin for Java development as well as the integration into Android Studio.

Spotify uses two major backend components to control this. First, we have a web-based ab testing system that they can use to rollout features to random subsets of users, grouped by region, as well as targeting different platforms (Android, iOS, Desktop). A developer simply adds a flag to the system, and then can use the flag in the code to exclude or include different code paths. Second, we have a sophisticated UI content framework that accepts JSON data to render certain pages throughout the app with the latest and most relevant data for that user. The framework not only controls content, but can shape the layout of the page. Multiple backends can provide the content and the clients interpret the data and render it in a consistent way natively.

We'll try to go a bit deeper and give you some numbers that you can take home on how different choices will impact the performances of your app both in terms of layout and draw time.

Are you even sure what you need is a View?

In this talk we will guide you briefly through the history of Android, mobiles architectures, the Kernel, where are we standing now and where are we heading too.

Using plain and simple example we will show you the “goods” and the “bads” of the software (Linux kernel) and hardware (microprocessors) designs and how its affect to the performance of current a Android platform devices. Once you have this inside of how of how the lowest level of Android works, it will be much easier for you as a developer, to help the actual kernel to take better decisions.

But as we promised, we will also show you a bit of the future, at Least at kernel level; and how, a good kernel implementation will reduce most of the current problems of android mobile platforms.

RESPONSIVE: Flow layouts dynamically from a single column on phone to grids and columns on tablets, even if you have multiple sections or view types.

DYNAMIC: Let your lists move! Let users expand and collapse content and insert asynchronously from the network, all with free predictive animations. We'll explore an approach and (soon-to-be-released) library from Genius which makes fine-grained updates in a RecyclerView easy.

SMOOTH: Setting layout backgrounds is so 2000 and late. We'll explore ItemDecorators from the simple to the complex -- decorating views with backgrounds, separators, and indents depending on their context (like sections with headers, groups with different "backgrounds", mixed rows and grids!)

INTERACTIVE: Allow any part of your content to be rearranged or swipe-to-delete.

All this, and avoid overdraw too! You'll learn on adapter, ItemDecorators, ItemTouchHelpers, ItemAnimators, SpanSizeLookups, and everything short of making your own LayoutManager.

This talk intends to share our journey from theory to implementation in an application with over 100 million downloads.  By the end, you should not only understand what Clean Architecture is, but how to implement it, and whether you should.

In the last couple of months a lot has changed. You've been introduced to brand new tools to help you cope with this problem. During this talk, Željko will share with you how to use several tools and techniques that have made our lives easier. he will explore different ways of predicting crashes even before they occur by means of static code checkers, automatic tests and CI setup. Additionally, you will learn how to detect memory leaks, explain advanced exception and crash logging by using a combination of several different tools. Finally, you'll discover how to provide a better crash experience or hide the crash altogether if the crash is simply inevitable!

In this session you will explore the most common pitfalls with Bluetooth LE on Android and how to deal with them. You'll learn how to properly scan for devices, connect to them, and exchange data. An introduction to Bluetooth LE concepts, such as GATT, services, characteristics and descriptors will also be included. After this session, you'll be better prepared to implement Bluetooth LE in your own applications.

Have you heard good things about Realm and considered replacing SQLite or ORM with Realm?

Do you know that with tons of advantages, Realm also brings some limitations?

Have you faced thread handling issues with Realm?

If yes, you will explore different integration approaches of Realm and best practices to follow, along with RxJava, Retrofit, Dagger, Annotations & MVP.

In this talk, you will be learning:

1. What is Realm and why use it.

2. Safe vs Deep integration of Realm in Android, with examples.

3. Best practices to follow when using Realm, with examples.

4. Unit testing of Realm, with examples.

Links: GitHub Blog

This talk requires basic Android understanding.

Android Architecture Blueprints is meant to demonstrate possible ways to help with these common problems. In this project we offer the same application implemented using different architectural concepts and tools.

This talk will explore the motivations, findings and numbers extracted from these various approaches which will help choosing which one works best for you and your team.

Through a real-world example, you will explore some techniques to connect design and development. You will discover how to organise colours and styles as well as create a pattern library of components.

By the end of the talk you will have a clear understanding of how to ensure you have a reusable, maintainable, scalable and predictable code base with a consistent UI throughout your app.

Learn how this is achieved using Epson’s Moverio transparent smart eyewear which overlays computer-generated sensory input onto a real world view, and in doing so provides innovative user experiences. Developers need to be aware of the powerful implications this technology has on the very near future of computing and how to get involved in the future of augmented reality.

Explore with Epson the endless potential of AR and the opportunities the technology opens for developers with access to detailed information regarding the development, use and functions of the technology, which can help you secure a significant position in a fast-paced market that is completely changing the way digital content is consumed by users.

This talk will focus on configuring three parts of Retrofit:

• Endpoint declarations on interfaces which define how requests are created and sent and how their responses are read and parsed.

• Serialization customization that goes beyond just choosing between JSON or Protocol Buffers.

• Execution mechanisms which enable synchronous or asynchronous requests, integration with third-party libraries, and custom error handling.

You will not need no prior Retrofit experience, although the focus will specifically be on configuring and customizing its behavior.

If you want your users to be comfortable using your app, you must place emphasis on utilising the security methods at your disposal.

In this talk Ana will cover the best practices in app security, demonstrate common mistakes and pitfalls and share what she's learned in her own experience in the mobile banking industry.

In this session, Liam and Francisco will briefly explore the rationale and theory behind the concept, and then go over the latest developments in Project Phoebe, the first open-source step toward mutative design.

Find out more on Phoebe here.

Find more info on the droidcon London Hack Weekend 2016 here.