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Deep‑link navigation in Expo Router exceeding the performance budget

The situation You are a senior mobile engineer on a React Native team that ships a consumer‑facing app with Expo SDK 50 and expo‑router 2.0.0. The p…

Unexpected behaviour of Expo Router deep links in production

The situation You are a mobile engineer on a two‑week sprint. Your team has added a new “Invite” screen that must be reachable from an email link (…

Flash SPI Tool: Flashing BIOS and SPI EEPROMs from Android with flashrom

Flash SPI Tool: Native Android GUI for BIOS and EEPROM Flashing (flashrom Engine) When repairing computer motherboards, laptops, or game consoles wi…

Programming PIC Microcontrollers on Android via USB-OTG (PIC k150 Protocol)

Programming PIC Microcontrollers on Android via USB-OTG without a PC Flashing classic microcontrollers like the Microchip PIC16F628A typically requi…

Views or Compose: hosting a full video editor in a Kotlin app

Disclosure: I build Nitrakit , the video editor SDK used in this post. Picture the ticket: "Let users edit their clip before posting." An Android en…

Android Version Code Strategy: versionCode vs versionName Done Right

Every release you ship to Google Play carries two version identifiers, and mixing them up is one of the most common — and most avoidable — release m…

Startup‑time regression: deciding if a Hermes rewrite is worth it

The situation You are a senior mobile engineer on a React‑Native team that just upgraded the JavaScript engine from JSC to Hermes (React‑Native 0.71…

Private Photo Vault for Android: What “Offline” Really Means

When people search for a private photo vault for Android, “offline” often sounds simple. But in practice, it can mean several different things. An a…

When a Fabric rewrite feels faster but you can’t prove it

The situation Say you are a React Native engineer on a mobile team that has just upgraded the UI stack from the legacy renderer to the new Fabric re…

Will an Old 3G Phone Work as a Security Camera on Mobile Data? What the E, H and 4G Icons Mean for Offline and Low-Data Setups

Many old Android phones in drawers today are 3G phones. Some are 4G phones that have been set to 3G or 2G years ago and never changed back. If you w…

How to Publish a Unity Game on Google Play: Build Settings, Keystores, and AAB Export

Unity developers live in the editor, but the path to publish a Unity game on Google Play runs through Android build tooling that Unity mostly hides…

Google Play Appeal: How to Write an Enforcement Appeal That Actually Works

Getting an enforcement email from Google Play — a rejection, a suspension, a strike — triggers panic. Most developers fire off an angry, vague appea…

Startup‑time regression after enabling Hermes in a React‑Native app

The situation Say you are a lead mobile engineer on a two‑month sprint for a consumer‑facing React‑Native app (React‑Native 0.73). The product team…

Tor VPN Beta: What we've learned building our own VPN for Android from scratch

ESP32 Web Serial API: Live Sensor Data in Next.js

What we built An ESP32 plugged into a PC over USB, with a web app (Next.js) connecting directly to the serial port through the Web Serial API and sh…

PureHub v1.0.0‑beta.59 – Security‑first Android utilities

PureHub v1.0.0‑beta.59 – Security‑first Android utilities PureHub continues its mission of providing 26 free, no‑ads, privacy‑first, open‑source uti…

Outside the Scope of Our Support

How to Publish Your First Android App on Google Play: A Complete Checklist

How to Publish Your First Android App on Google Play: A Complete Checklist Publishing your first Android app on Google Play involves more moving par…

Deep‑link crashes in Expo Router when the app hits real traffic

The situation You are a mobile lead on a React Native product that just shipped version 2.4 with Expo Router 2.1.0. The release added a “share‑to‑ap…

Unexpected UI glitches after enabling React Native Fabric

The situation Say you are the lead mobile engineer on a cross‑platform product that ships a daily active user base of ≈ 500 k. The next sprint’s mil…

Why I Built an Unbypassable, 100% Offline Android Focus App with Kotlin & Jetpack Compose

The Problem with 99% of App Blockers We’ve all been there: You download a screen time tracker, set a 30-minute Instagram limit, and the moment you c…

Architecting for Zero-Data Privacy: How I Implemented Android's Local-Only SQLite Architecture in Muffle

The Silent Crisis I was sitting in the front row of a Friday Jumu'ah prayer. The imam had just begun the khutbah, the room was perfectly still, and…

Easy Full Stack Authentication and Login in the Style of Spring

Three requests leave your app just as its access token expires. If each refreshes independently, the first exchange can invalidate the refresh token…

How apps spot an Android emulator (part 1): build props and kernel tells

How apps spot an Android emulator (part 1): build props and kernel tells I spent a few days this month poking at a stock Android emulator to answer…

Run opencode on Android: a free launcher that turns your phone into an AI coding station

opencode` is a terminal-based AI coding agent for your own machine. But what if "your machine" is the phone in your pocket? OpenCode Android is a fr…

Android on iOS, Web & Desktop Efficiently and for Free

We are not the first to bring Android to iOS. Earlier projects brought Android's runtime along with the application. Dalvik was built for Android, i…

Unexpected UI‑Thread Jank When Using Reanimated 4 Worklets

The situation You are a mobile engineer on a small React‑Native team (React Native 0.73, Reanimated 4.5). The sprint goal is to implement a draggabl…

The Screenshot Was Ready. The Status Bar Wasn’t.

A practical Android screenshot workflow for controlling battery, carrier, signal and status-bar details before export. The app screen looked right.…

Pawdub: a pet translator app that refuses to pretend it translates (Android, on-device)

A dog barks at the front door and a subtitle fades in under him: "THE MAILMAN HAS RETURNED. I WILL HANDLE THIS." That is Pawdub, a new Android app I…

Stop Bypassing SSL in Flutter: Solving the Missing Intermediate Certificate Nightmare with AIA Chasing

Stop Bypassing SSL in Flutter: Solving the Missing Intermediate Certificate Nightmare with AIA Chasing Every Flutter developer has run into this mad…