Wear OS has changed a lot over the last 8 years. It’s snappier, more efficient and includes a variety of UI surfaces for which you can develop. While strapping a physical device to your wrist for a few days is really the best way to get a feel for what…

The semantics modifiers let us change aspects of the semantics tree in Jetpack Compose UI — a representation of the UI that’s helpful for accessibility services and the testing framework. We can use these modifiers to group a number of widgets into one logical element, making it faster to navigate…

Learn what state descriptions are, why they’re important for accessibility and how you can use them on older versions of Android. — State descriptions are a relatively new addition to the accessibility toolbox on Android, having been added in Android 11 (API 30). It’s a dedicated property used to describe a UI component’s current state. Before this API, we had to overload the content description to provide this extra information:

In this post, we’ll add support for Google TalkBack (and other Android accessibility services) to a MovieRatings custom view — I’ve been working very slowly on an Android app in my spare time. It’s a client for Letterboxd (like Goodreads but for movies) and I’m currently replicating a feature that’s available on the website: you can see the user rating distribution for every movie. The API gives us everything that…

Preventing regressions with custom Lint checks (Part 5) — This is part five of a five-part series on refactoring themes and styles — it’ll make sense without reading the other parts, but if you want the full picture, start reading here: Refactoring Android Themes with Style: Restructuring Themes Making changes to themes and styles safelymedium.com After all the hard work we’ve put in, detangling our themes, defining new attributes, and determining default styles…

Building a Gallery App (Part 4) — This is part four of a series on refactoring themes and styles — it’ll make sense without reading the other parts, but if you want the full picture, start reading here: Refactoring Android Themes with Style: Restructuring Themes Making changes to themes and styles safelymedium.com At Monzo, we often create short-lived apps which only depend on the specific modules we need to test our…

Using Theme Overlays (Part 3) — This is part three of a series on refactoring themes and styles — it’ll make sense without reading the other parts, but if you want the full picture, start reading here: Refactoring Android Themes with Style: Restructuring Themes Making changes to themes and styles safelymedium.com Theme overlays are used to override values from your theme. At Monzo, we leverage theme overlays in different ways…

Default Styles (Part 2) — This is part two of a series on refactoring themes and styles — it’ll make sense without reading part one, but if you want the full picture, check it out here: Refactoring Android Themes with Style: Restructuring Themes Making changes to themes and styles safelymedium.com In the last post, we recounted what the theme structure looked like for the Monzo Android app. There were…

Restructuring Themes (Part 1) — Last year, Nick Butcher and Chris Banes presented “Developing Themes with Style” at Droidcon Berlin. It was a welcome recap for themes and styles, as well as best practices for Android theming. Developing Themes with Style With Nick Butcher The Android Theming system is powerful but easy to misuse. Proper use of it can make themes and…chris.banes.dev We’ve been working to apply these best practices to the Android app at Monzo. For us, the challenge…