Weekend good reads for Android developers, issue #32 (18/2022)

It’s Friday and we are back after a short break with a pack of articles to go over the long (for some of you) weekend.

7 things to keep in mind while building jetpack composable’s

Although the documentation for Jetpack Compose is considered to be very good, we often notice some problems only when using a specific tool. If you'd prefer to learn from someone else's rather than your own mistakes, then check out this article.

The curious case of crashing Workers

WorkManager is great to schedule background work on Android. However, since scheduled work lives outside of the app lifecycle, you might run into unexpected crashes. Check this article and learn how to prevent this.

Kotlin coroutine dispatchers overview

In this article, Vasiliy describes different types of coroutine dispatchers.

Modeling Retrofit Responses With Sealed Classes and Coroutines

Handling Retrofit responses and exceptions is an essential part of modern Android app architecture. This article covers modeling responses with sealed classes and coroutines in a multi-layered architecture.

Bonus:

Flutter Swagger Generator — package to save your time

This article is about Flutter Swagger Generator package which I strongly recommend to try.

That’s all from us

Fuchsia OS on Samsung phones?

As reported by several independent sources, Samsung is involved in the development of Fuschsia OS, and recent reports suggest the company is ready to ditch Android entirely and switch to the new system. Of course, such a shift would take years and the two systems would coexist for a long time. We cannot expect Samsung to take such a big risk overnight, because if Fuchsia OS does not work out, may bury the entire mobile department of the manufacturer.

Nest Hub Max may soon run Fuchsia

The Nest Hub Max may soon be switched to Fuchsia — Google’s homegrown operating system as internal testing ramps up. Earlier this year, Google took the bold step of updating existing first-gen Nest Hub smart displays from their Linux-based Cast OS to the company’s long-in-development Fuchsia operating system.

At this point, there’s no way to know how long it will be before retail Nest Hub Max devices will be updated with Fuchsia, if at all. If things follow the pattern of the original Nest Hub, Fuchsia will be made available first to those in the Preview Program in the Google Home app.

Flame 1.0.0 is released

Flame is a modular Flutter game engine that provides a complete set of solutions for games. Provides you with a simple implementation of the game cycle and the necessary functions that you may need in the game, like input, images, sprites, animation, collision detection, and a component system, which is called Flame Component System (abbreviated FCS).

Flutter logo

Flutter SVG is in release now

Flutter SVG is the library that provides the ability to render SVG in Flutter

On December 4, 2021, Flutter SVG was updated to 1.0.0 and officially in a stable release.
List of changes in this library:

  • New widget/RenderObject implementation to avoid rebuilds/paints when near or overlapping an animating widget. Also should improve raster cacheability.
  • Correctly list web as a supported platform.
  • Support for em/ex units.
  • Stable 1.0.0 release.

Links:

Isolates became to ~100x faster in Dart 2.15

Isolates spawned via the Isolate.spawn() API are now grouped, operate on the same managed heap and can therefore share various VM-internal data structures.

This leads to ~100x faster isolate startup latency, ~10-100x lower per-isolate base memory overhead and ~8x faster inter-isolate communication.

Dart programming language | Dart

Dart 2.15 is now available in the flutter beta channel, more details can be found here: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Fuchsia OS is starting to rolling out to the first-gen Nest Hub

Fuchsia OS update brings no significant changes to the Nest Hub. Since Google uses Flutter to build its smart display experience, the user experience will remain same even though the underlying OS is changing from Linux-based OS to Fuchsia OS. Google says the Fuchsia update for the Nest Hub will roll out to users over the coming months, starting from users in the Preview Program.