Droidcon App!

Happy birthday!

(Crosspost from medium.com/@kpgalligan)

We’re gearing up to have our 4th year of Droidcon NYC! The talk selection committee just started voting, and we have an excellent lineup. Should be a great event.

Because we’re a mobile dev shop, and mostly an Android shop, we’ve launched an Android app for the Android conference each year. Last year we used Doppl to create an iOS version of the app as well (Apple is pretty serious about not having Android in the app store, though).

It’s his birthday, btw.

The current version of the Droidcon app started back in 2014. We used some early Kotlin, way way before that was a “thing”. However, in 2017, it’s some pretty old looking Kotlin. We also used some libraries and architectures that aren’t exactly current “best practice” by Android standards.

There were also zero tests. So, you know.

We want to have a nice, public example of a well designed Android app, the very modern architecture of which can then be used directly in iOS. We also want to train some more of our team on Doppl, and figured we’d do it publicly.

Keep an eye on the Droidcon example app. We’ll be modifying a few things over the next few weeks.

Database

Back in 2009 or so, I was the person who did the Android port of ORMLite. In 2015 I wrote an annotation processing update of that. We used it internally, but there were too many DB libraries already, so it’s kind of abandoned. We’re moving the DB to Room (or maybe SQL Delight. See how it goes).

Threading

I wrote a threading task queue a couple years ago. It was designed to be simple, and also implement a persisted queue for offline support. Everybody has kind of moved away from the “event bus” model over the past few years, so the non-persisted tasks will be implemented in RxJava 2. The persisted stuff will be backed by the Android Priority Job queue. Fun fact, Yigit did that and the Room DB stuff. Thanks, Yigit!

Networking

The current app uses Retrofit v1. Doppl doesn’t have Retrofit v2 yet because we need Okhttp to support ssl, or we need a different call client. We’re going to move the Droidcon app to Retrofit v2 to sort of force the issue and prioritize sorting out the Retrofit v2 situation.

General Architecture

We’ll be moving to the new architecture components, but probably using Rx instead of LiveData. I’m not sure right now how much of that will make sense in an iOS context. Obviously, we’ll need some implementation of the lifecycle stuff, but it won’t mean as much. That’s all still TBD. The general idea of Doppl is to move as much code as possible into the shared space, though, so hopefully, the architecture code makes sense.

Changes

This year’s app will be simpler than previous years. We’re removing the “login” requirement. It doesn’t make all that much sense. The only feature loss to the user will be a lack of sharing RSVP’s between devices, which seems ridiculously unnecessary. This will simplify the code considerably, but should still deliver similar functionality and UX.

Thanks to Peter Chislett.