When we release an Android app on Play Store, we constantly track error logs, crashes and ANRs via different mediums. 1. Playstore: We check our Playstore console regularly for statistics and crash reports. 2. Our common error logging system (Newmonk): To ensure our app is working fine and users are not facing any technical issues, we collect error logs using our own error handling module. We regularly check this interface as well. We follow a Roster programme wherein the team members take turns to monitor app health and constantly look for solutions to optimize the efforts being spent by... Read More

It is quite common for any application to be built and tested in multiple environments like development, test, staging, production etc... And it is typical to have a different set of URLs for each environment. The same holds true for Android applications also. Ever since we started building Android apps (in Eclipse), managing environments was a tedious but necessary task. In web applications we could easily use symbolic links to separate our environment configurations but it had to be something else in Android apps. A very simple approach is to define an environment variable and change it as... Read More

In an android app, when we attach an AutoCompleteTextView to display suggestions while a user is typing, we can fetch the list of suggestions in two ways. One way is to store the data in a local database and fetch it using a search query on the search keyword entered by the user. Another way is to fetch list of suggestions in real time, by generating a search url with the search keyword and hitting the web service. In the second approach, we fetch data directly from server, so whenever the list of suggestions changes, it gets reflected immediately in the app. Whereas in the first one, we... Read More