Android Dev - App Feedback Thread - September 04, 2021

App Feedback Thread - September 04, 2021
What are the core differences between Jetpack Compose and Flutter in terms of UI rendering?
Google Play team rejected the application due to SMS/Call permission
Mocking API for efficient development with mockoon
Is the Input NDK API the worst API ever conceived?
Android equivalent to iOS's SceneKit for PBR?
LiveData vs Kotlin Flows
I want to build an app which uses Firebase. I have previously built an app for a school project in Java and found it very convoluted and needlessly complicated, so I am thinking about learning Flutter - is this a good idea (if I already know basic android SDK)?
Open library of Composables like pub.dev is for Flutter
Why did adding this weird line of code make my code for widgets start working as expected? What does it do?
Android Studio Bumblebee Canary 11 available
Is it legal to use other apps and website tools in my app?

App Feedback Thread - September 04, 2021

Posted: 04 Sep 2021 06:00 AM PDT

This thread is for getting feedback on your own apps.

Developers:

must provide feedback for others
must include Play Store, GitHub, or BitBucket link
must make a top level comment
must make an effort to respond to questions and feedback from commenters
app may be open or closed source

Commenters:

must give constructive feedback in replies to top level comments
must not include links to other apps

To cut down on spam, accounts who are too young or do not have enough karma to post will be removed. Please make an effort to contribute to the community before asking for feedback.

As always, the mod team is only a small group of people, and we rely on the readers to help us maintain this subreddit. Please report any rule breakers. Thank you.

submitted by /u/AutoModerator
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What are the core differences between Jetpack Compose and Flutter in terms of UI rendering?

Posted: 04 Sep 2021 02:12 AM PDT

Google says that Jetpack Compose is a toolkit for building "native UI". But how come it's a native UI? Compose it's a library that not present natively on Android devices, and must be included in each app that uses it. So what differs it from Flutter. I would be glad if you could answer. Thank you.

submitted by /u/Sensitive_Muffin_555
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Google Play team rejected the application due to SMS/Call permission

Posted: 04 Sep 2021 01:15 AM PDT

Our team has just built the connected device companion app that enables receiving of the SMS and Call. The first version is already published on the play store with version 1.0

I have declared the SMS and Call permission

RECEIVE_MMS, READ_SMS, RECEIVE_SMS, READ_CALL_LOG

We have a key feature called is Notification. It works as I described as below:

The Connected Device (The Watch) is connected with the Application
When the user adds the contact to the application, the watch will be showed the notification alert when receiving the call from the contact on the phone.

Our team just finished the development of the application with a new version like version 2.0. When I have submitted the application to Google Play and got rejected due to error as below:

Requested permissions do not match core functionality of the appYou declared Connected device companion apps that enable sending and receiving of SMS or calls as the core functionality of your app. However, after review, we found that your app does not match the declared use case(s). Learn more about permitted uses and exceptions.Please either:• Make changes to your app so that it meets the requirements of the declared core functionality or,• Select a use case that matches your app's functionality

I think that my application is in compliance. I have submitted the application again but still got the rejected from Google Play team.

I did submit the appeal form to the Google Play team. In the appeal form, I also provided a detailed document and capture the video of how the notification feature works with the application and connected device.

Today they responded to us with an email as below:

As mentioned previous email, it is required to specifically indicate the app is a companion device app that connects to devices in the store listing. It is required to provide a specific explanation of what products or devices are connected and usable. Inclusion of links to descriptions of related products may also be an option.

Please be mindful that our policy team does not support pre-compliance check.The developer needs to resubmit the app with compliant APK in order to be in review process.

I had a couple of questions:

What should I do for this case?
Should I send to the Google Play team a Connected Device (The Smartwatch) so that they can find out the features for this application?

Will really appreciate your help! Thanks in advance!

submitted by /u/Western_Hedgehog584
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Mocking API for efficient development with mockoon

Posted: 03 Sep 2021 08:39 PM PDT

I wrote a blog about mocking API using FOSS Mockoon. This is really useful and I use it everyday. Whenever I develop a new feature and want to test various conditions like when API responds with error or other unexpected data I can quickly do that with mockoon. I have also explained my normal workflow for development using mockoon.

I hope this is helpful. Thank you. https://susuthapa19961227.medium.com/easy-front-end-development-with-mockoon-1ff656a7dba6

submitted by /u/susonthapa
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Is the Input NDK API the worst API ever conceived?

Posted: 04 Sep 2021 04:38 AM PDT

Is it just me, or is this API absolutely terrible?

Sometimes an AInputEvent contains a single event whose index you have to get by masking some value. Sometimes it contain multiple events which you have to loop through.
There are no types to help you out how to do things, everything in this API is an integer. Is it an enum, or is it a bunch of flags I need to mask? Sometimes I think it's both?
The touch events and the mouse events overlap: if you click somewhere, touch events are also fired on mouse down and mouse up, so if you want to handle mouse events you have to modify the code that handles touch events.

I honestly have never seen anything like this, and I've been around (iOS, Bada OS, Blackberry QNX, game consoles).

Sorry for the rant, but every time I use this API I think that it's the worst API I've ever seen and I must know if I'm the only one that thinks that.

submitted by /u/Jyaif
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Android equivalent to iOS's SceneKit for PBR?

Posted: 03 Sep 2021 08:04 PM PDT

I'm working on an app that displays "swatches" of physical materials (ex. colored anodized steel, metallic paint, etc...). It would be awesome if I could dynamically generate these material swatches on the device using a physically based rendering (PBR) engine, rather than just using static .pngs exported from Blender. That would allow the user to actually customize their material swatch instead of "faking" it by changing the hue and contrast of an image.

I don't need to render 3D models, scenes, animations, ray tracing, etc... just a 2D texture. So lightweight/simple is perfectly fine.

I know iOS has SceneKit that can do this out of the box. Does a library of such nature exist for Android? 3rd party is ok.

submitted by /u/lamborghini392
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LiveData vs Kotlin Flows

Posted: 03 Sep 2021 10:14 AM PDT

Is Kotlin Flows what developers should be migrating to from LiveData? Is there also a better alternative to ViewModel? Right now I'm aware of the combination of ViewModel + LiveData being widely used for Android applications, haven't really heard much about ViewModel + Kotlin Flows.

submitted by /u/techsavvynerd91
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I want to build an app which uses Firebase. I have previously built an app for a school project in Java and found it very convoluted and needlessly complicated, so I am thinking about learning Flutter - is this a good idea (if I already know basic android SDK)?

Posted: 04 Sep 2021 04:06 AM PDT

submitted by /u/Ambi-Phoenix1
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Open library of Composables like pub.dev is for Flutter

Posted: 03 Sep 2021 01:39 PM PDT

Is there any public library of Composables like pub.dev is for Flutter, where users can submit self made Composables for the rest of people to reuse ?

submitted by /u/madeAccountWenBored
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Why did adding this weird line of code make my code for widgets start working as expected? What does it do?

Posted: 03 Sep 2021 09:51 AM PDT

I've been scratching my head since yesterday as to why my code for widget wasn't working. I debugged it for hours and still couldn't understand.

Here's the scenario:

I created a configurable widget using Configuration Activity.
You can create multiple widgets using the same configuration activity, but with different data.
When a particular widget is clicked, it'll fetch data related to that same widget.
This will work 100% as expected whenever new widget is created

Problem:

I created a PendingIntent whenever each of these widgets were created, which will launch a Service in background to update the data in it.

val intent = Intent(context, ServiceForFetchingParticularWidgetData::class.java) intent.putExtra(CURRENT_WIDGET_ID, appWidgetId) val pendingIntent = PendingIntent.getService(context, 0, intent, 0)

views.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.base_view_for_detecting_clicks, pendingIntent) appWidgetManager.updateAppWidget(appWidgetId, views)

As you can see, I passed the current widget ID properly through the Intent for service.

The issue was, if I created 3 widgets (from same activity), with ID's 33, 34,35. This ID that was passed to the intent would be 33 (the first widget that was created).

So when Widget with ID 35 was clicked, the service would fetch and update only Widget with ID 33 (even if in theory it should be fetching data for Widget ID 35).

The code was 100% flawless, it should've been working as intended from get go.

Weird code:

So when I was searching SO, I found this answer -> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28049544/multiple-widgets-with-configuration-activity

In it, there was this weird line of code:

intent.data = Uri.withAppendedPath( Uri.parse("abc" + "://widget/id/"),

appWidgetId.toString() )

This didn't make sense to me first. The person who wrote this answer added in their comment the following line ->

//*****THE FOLLOWING IS A MUST!!! //if no intent.setData to something very specific, the intents for each widget are UNIFIED into one intent and //this intent will be the original intent with no ID at all

And when I added the above code (i.e. set data for intent), my widget started working 100% perfectly. When I click on Widget with ID 35, it updates the widget with ID 35.

So the code example in problem changed to this ->

val intent = Intent(context, ServiceForFetchingParticularWidgetData::class.java) intent.putExtra(CURRENT_WIDGET_ID, appWidgetId) intent.data = Uri.withAppendedPath( Uri.parse("abc" + "://widget/id/"), appWidgetId.toString() ) val pendingIntent = PendingIntent.getService(context, 0, intent, 0)

views.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.base_view_for_detecting_clicks, pendingIntent) appWidgetManager.updateAppWidget(appWidgetId, views)

Someone please explain to me why setting data for intent is required here because it wasted a lot of my time since yesterday.

submitted by /u/AwkwardShake
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Android Studio Bumblebee Canary 11 available

Posted: 03 Sep 2021 09:58 AM PDT

submitted by /u/androidtoolsbot
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Is it legal to use other apps and website tools in my app?

Posted: 03 Sep 2021 04:17 PM PDT

I am working on a web application and I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

I need voice chat and I need other tools that already exist in a better form.

So let's say I want to start a zoom call using my web app. What is the legality of this?

submitted by /u/Inevitable_Ad5732
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