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Building a Native QR/Barcode Scanner for React Native — New Architecture Ready

Most QR scanner libraries for React Native share the same problems — they're unmaintained, they don't support the New Architecture, or they pull in a …

# Giving an LLM Eyes and Hands on a Mobile Simulator

The interface a human uses When a person does QA in tapflow, the loop is: Look at the simulator screen Decide what to do (tap, swipe, type) Do it Look…

"Reinstalling Won't Fix It": A Cross-App Shared-Auth Deadlock After Switching Phones

After migrating to a new Android phone, a few specific apps stopped launching. Amazon Shopping and Kindle would freeze on a blank white or black scree…

tapflow v0.3.x: Deeplinks, Keyboard Shortcuts, Screenshot API, and an Experimental MCP Server

Deeplink execution from the browser The one that came up most in real usage: testers frequently need to trigger deeplinks to verify specific app state…

Trider – The AI Habit Tracker That Actually Gets You (Free, No Ads)

Why Most Habit Trackers Fail After 2 Weeks You know the pattern: install a habit tracker, go hard for 3 days, miss one day, feel guilty, open the app …

I Built an Android App With Zero Backend — Here's What Happened

I got tired of apps trying to monetize my attention. Notifications, ads, endless feeds — it never stops. So I decided to build an Android app with zer…

The Kimwolf Bust Just Outed Android Webcams as Botnet Fodder — Here's the Question Every Repurposed-Phone Camera Setup Has to Answer

On May 22, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of a 23-year-old in Ottawa for allegedly running Kimwolf , a DDoS-for-hire botnet…

I Built a Mac App That Keeps Your Clipboard in Sync Across All Your Android Devices

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. I've been building Mac utilities for Android developers for a while now. HiyokoClip is the one I use most …

Vestige: A Gemma 4 Brain Tracker That Won't Blow Smoke Up Your Ass

This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Build with Gemma 4 TL;DR What: Vestige —an ADHD-friendly Android app designed to point out the things …

Remix Mini PC: After a Year of Dead Ends, the eMMC Finally Talks

Source files: GitHub For more than a year I have been chasing the same brick wall on the Remix Mini PC project: I could sideload a working Linux from …

My first Android App - NightLock

I built my first Android app called NightLock — an open-source digital wellbeing app focused on Focus Mode, Bedtime Lock, and app usage control to red…

Stop Wasting Tokens on Android Automation

Stop Wasting Tokens on Android Automation Most LLM-driven Android automation starts by showing the model a screen. That sounds reasonable. A human loo…

I Scanned 10 Popular F-Droid Apps With My Security Scanner — Open Source Secure

"It's open source, so it's secure." I hear this all the time. The idea is simple: if the code is public, someone must have reviewed it. Vulnerabilitie…

The Sleeper Announcement from Google I/O 2026 That Will Change How We Think About Apps

This is a submission for the Google I/O Writing Challenge Everyone walked away from Google I/O 2026 talking about Compose First, Gemini integrations, …

scrcpy Integration in a Tauri App — Android Screen Mirroring on Mac

HiyokoKit includes Android remote control via scrcpy. Launching and managing scrcpy from a Tauri app has specific challenges. Here's how I handle it. …

Floatkit is live now!!!

A Floating Productivity Panel I Built for Android Fari Ji Fari Ji Fari Ji Follow May 23 A Floating Productivity Panel I Built for Android # showdev # …

Gemma 4 on Android: Tricks for Faster On-Device Inference

When I tried building an on-device AI app with Gemma 4, the pitch was clear: model weights on the device, no server, no API calls, works offline. Gett…

AccessLens — a blind person's lanyard, powered by Gemma 4 on-device

This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Build with Gemma 4 What I Built AccessLens is an Android app that turns a Pixel 8 worn on a lanyard in…

Adaptable apps on ChromeOS: a post-mortem

In my previous article Building a custom launcher for ChromeOS I described how Be nice runs on Chromebooks: not as a real default home app, because de…

Skills, Java 17, And Theme Accents

Last week was about Metal and the Skin Designer. This week the headline items are about what a brand new project looks like when you generate it: the …

R8 Minification Silently Killed My Android App's Core Feature (And Tests Didn't Catch It)

My CI pipeline was green. Unit tests passed. The APK built and signed without errors. I installed it on my Pixel 3. The app launched, looked perfect. …

Pragmatic Optimization in Mobile App Size: 3 Misconceptions

The Importance of Pragmatic Optimization in Mobile App Size In the world of mobile app development, I often see that app size plays a critical role in…

Keccak256 From Scratch in 200 Lines of Kotlin (Because Web3j Was 8 MB)

Web3j is 8 MB. My APK is 4.5 MB. So I wrote the Ethereum hash function from scratch. Why Not Just Import Web3j? I was building a native Ethereum walle…

Reverse engineering Android malware with Claude Code

What I Learned Untangling LiteRT, LiteRT-LM, and TFLite

When we started building Redacto - an on-device PII redaction app running Gemma 4 E2B on a Snapdragon 8 Elite - we kept tripping over three names: TFL…

Why Your Google Play 14-Day Testing Clock Keeps Resetting (And How to Stop It)

Why Your Google Play 14-Day Testing Clock Keeps Resetting (And How to Stop It) You hit 12 testers. You watch the Play Console dashboard. Day 3, day 5,…

Chris Banes' Skills Repo: Claude Code Meets Android Development

Last week Chris Banes — yeah, that Chris Banes from the Android team at Google — published a public repo of Claude Code skills targeting Kotlin, Jetpa…

Android 17 Is Here — And Google Finally Did the Thing

You know that moment at the coffee shop when your iPhone-using friend glances at your phone and, without saying anything, gives you the look ? That po…

Turning Android WebView into a Real Local HTTP Runtime

Turning Android WebView into a Real Local HTTP Runtime Most Android hybrid apps still load their frontend using: file:// And that comes with problems:…

Running Hermes Agent on Android: A Production AI Agent in Your Pocket

No server. No cloud bill. Just a phone, Termux, and an AI agent that ships code. When I first heard about Hermes Agent, the open-source agentic framew…