Welcome ClassyShark

How many times in your Android app, have you struggled with the bug that didn’t come from your sources? How many times have you asked yourself “what will happen to my dex count when I add this library” ? How about spending hours with your code and trying to understand why your app is that slow, even though the code seems to be fine.

I know, I have done it a lot ….

Hi, my name is Boris Farber. I work at Google focusing on Android data intensive apps.

I help developers make their Android app faster and better by focusing on multidex, dependencies, Proguard, Java language usage, JNI, JSON etc. The problem is, I didn’t have any good tools to make this easier. As you might guess, this is frustrating and totally un-scalable.

So after another solved problem, I stopped and thought, what can give me better tools, like an IDE gives, to have all the stuff that I need in one place, sorted out; I just click a button and all will work.

So this is how ClassyShark was created. On a flight to New York (to speak at DroidCon NYC), I wrote a super simple swing app. This app reads jar files and generates Java like code from the loaded class, using reflection. Here what the app looked like:

I had a feeling that this is a good place to start. For every problem I encountered, I kept adding more functionality. When a similar problem arose, I could solve it no time.

I tossed it around and asked my team members and Android GDEs what functionality to add to solve their problems…

In the upcoming posts I will continue the ClassyShark’s story and explain the flows (really simple) for you to solve your problems.