The Takeaway from Droidcon SG 2019
First, I would like to thank Bukalapak for supporting me to attend Droidcon SG 2019.
Droidcon SG 2019 is organized by Android in Asia — Singapore’s largest Android Developers meet up group since 2013. It is the global Android developer event that originated in Berlin 10 years ago, connecting over 25,000 developers worldwide. It was first held in 2018, and the tickets were all sold out in 2018 and in 2019.
So let’s just get to the point. Here are the takeaways I got from Droidcon SG 2019.
1. Remote Config and Beyond
By Ayushi Gupta
To be honest, I’m not that interested when I read the title. But here comes the quotes “Don’t judge a book by its cover”.
This session talked about how Hotstar (Streaming Service with 300m+ users which are owned by Disney itself) scale their app using Remote Config. What I got here is the way they utilize Firebase to do Remote Config by using A/B Testing and feature toggling when releasing new features.
So, how can Remote Config help to release product faster?
The point is, we can toggle features or do A/B Test to release new features partially and dynamically. It means when the newly released feature is breaking/throwing error, you can toggle it off or revert it to the old version using Remote Config and then fix it for the new version then toggled it on again on the next version. So it helps your team to be more confident at releasing features faster.
2. Google Assistant — Reaching Next Billion Users with Your Actions
By Anuvrat Rao
I am sure everyone knows about Google Assistant, yeah me too. But in this talk I learned about Action Templates which can help you create actions for Google Assistant without writing a single line of code, you just need to fill in a Google Sheet and you can build a finished Action within minutes.
3. How we scale Apps at Tokopedia
By Nathaniel Khuana
From this session, I learned about :
- How to tackle the App Bundles problem which is caused by users who installed their apps not from playstore (sideload apk) by using Sideload Check
- How they speed up their build time from 1 hour to 2 minutes by using no-op modules (create dummy modules to replace the real module, in fact, you won’t need all modules on development), and by googling no-op I found that Traveloka uses it too?
4. Myths and Reality of Android Machine Learning
By Hoi Lam
On this session I learned some myth of Machine Learning in Android, which are :
- Android is not powerful enough for machine learning (myth)
The reality is you can do Machine Learning with Android on pre-trained data. For example, there’re apps which can detect faces and use a realtime filter. - Machine Learning is not for me, It’s for people with PhDs(myth)
Well you can just use a ready-made library like Google ML Kit which is really helpful when developing an app which needs to be powered by Machine Learning - Machine Learning needs a lot of data(myth)
Well, just use google’s AutoML Vision Edge or Vision API, they provide a pre-trained model for users to use
To learn more, just visit developer.android.com/ml
Other than that, there’s a thing I learned from this session, I learned how to show detailed content by showing QRCode on the slides to enabled the audience to scan and look at the detail (Hoi Lam shows QRcode which links to Github codes or documentation)
5. Shrinking WhatsApp
By Evelio Tarazona Cáceres
The teaser of this session is (Whatsapp is Single Dex), it amazed me so much when I knew this.
So I learned that they shrink their Whatsapp size by :
- Removing Metadata and unused files from .apk
How is this done? first, they unzip the apk, remove the metadata from the file inside the apk and remove some unused file then they repackage and signed it again. (If I’m not wrong they managed to make it 1mb smaller) - Using Internal Library Called StringsPacks (going to be open sourced)
- Remove Unused Resources
- R8 + Redex
Without redex, they won’t reach single dex.
Whatsapp Future Work
6. Android Atomic Development: Implementing Design Systems for Scalable Android Development
By Brandon John-Freso
It’s not new for me because our company has implemented atomic design 2 years ago.
It’s a good design system which can help the developer to build scalable App by grouping the component into Atoms, Molecules, Organisms, and Templates which can be joined into pages.
I think instead of explaining this again, please just read A journey towards Atomic Design on Android as I think it’s a good article to know more about atomic design. (FYI wework use Epoxy to adapt their views into recyclerView)
7. Android Accessibility Testing
By Shailen Tuli
From this session, as a developer, we are encouraged to make our app usable for people with disability by improving the accessibility of the app. Before improving it, you can try Accessibility Testing to know if your app is usable for people with disability. The easiest way to test it is to use Accessibility Scanner
8. Beyond ExoPlayer — Advances in Video Codecs
By Julius Uy
Here’s the last session of the conference. Well again, the title is not that interesting because I thought it will just talk about ExoPlayer. But rather, I learned the basic of video codecs, why it exists, how it works, and new future of codecs that will be released.
and what blew my mind is this information given by the speaker
Other than those sessions, my friends and I learned a lot by having small talks with the engineering managers and tech leads from other tech companies.
That’s all the takeaway I got from attending Droidcon SG 2019.
I give my thanks to all the sponsors, committees, and speakers for this event.
