Often, there will be problems experienced by more than one person in the team or some code which is shared between multiple projects. Those present an excellent opportunity to form a common solution into an open-source library, helping anyone that could make use of it, inside or outside of the company. When creating a library, we strive to make it straightforward, easy-to-use and applicable to everyone, rather than limiting it to our use-cases.
Developing a library is like working on your mini-project. It can provide you with a sense of pride and accomplishment, as well as being a great learning opportunity.
Prince of Versions
Prince of Versions is a library for handling application updates. We use it on almost every project as it solves the issue of handling optional and mandatory updates. It is split into two modules:
Queen of Versions - checks update availability using in-app updates
Prince of Versions - checks for updates via a remote or local source (usually a JSON file on the server).
Sentinel
Sentinel is a simple one screen UI which provides a standardised entry point for tools used in development and QA alongside device, application and permissions data. Including it in your project has a good chance of making your QA very happy, as well as making debugging easier, especially with networking, database, or analytics issues.
DbInspector
DbInspector is a library for viewing the contents of the in-app database for debugging purposes. While somewhat replaced by the new Android Studio's Database Inspector feature, it is useful for QA and is included as a Sentinel tool.
Localian
Localian is a library that manipulates your application locale and language across multiple Android API levels with possibility not to restart application process.
Collar
Gradle plugin which collects all analytics screen names, events and user properties for Android projects. This plugin has been written in Kotlin but works both inside Kotlin and Java projects.
Collar does NOT send out analytics data to remote services. This is left for the developer to solve in their own codebase, with Collar being simply a reflection of the current state of analytics data.
JsonApiX
JSON API X is an Android, annotation processor library that implements a parser between Kotlin classes and JSON API specification strings in both directions. Includes Retrofit module for easy API implementations.
Retromock
Retromock is a library for mocking responses in a Retrofit service. It uses annotations and is very simple and intuitive to implement. If you work for a project with an inconsistent API uptime or are ahead of the backend team in the development, you will undoubtedly find it useful.
ConnectionBuddy
ConnectionBuddy is a utility library for handling connectivity change events. It provides a simple way of listening to connectivity events, particularly useful for applications which need to change behaviour dynamically based on the connection state.
Thrifty Retrofit converter
Thrifty Retrofit converter is a Retrofit converter which uses Thrifty for (de)serialization of Apache Thrift requests and responses.
Goldfinger
Goldfinger is a library which simplifies biometric authentication implementation - our go-to on projects which use biometrics.
GoldenEye
GoldenEye is a wrapper for Camera1 and Camera2 API which exposes simple to use interface. Android camera is infamously difficult to use, and GoldenEye is our take at simplifying it.