GDG DevFest Ukraine 2017: key notes
Recently UPTech Android team visited one of the biggest software development conferences in Central and Eastern Europe — GDG DevFest Ukraine 2017. It was really large (900+ attendees, 45 speakers, 43 sessions at 4 treads) interesting and full of different events, that is why we decided to share what we’ve leant at the comference.
Product development approach
Product-centric approach is a must-have. It doesn’t matter if your company is product or outsource, you should care about product quality and users, their experience with the app;
How to attract users
Engaging app users is really important these days. A user gets an impression about the product during a first couple of seconds, so we should show key features and advantages. That is why splash screen with endless loader or registration form aren’t always the best options for the very first moments of interaction with the user. We should show how the app can be useful for him before asking for favor(registration/login)
Internet of Things
IoT is a quite a perspective thing today, so we have to pay attention to it. There is huge amount of different devices around us and we can improve them by turning them into IoT devices. Using small controllers, we can control lightning, AC, doors locks — anything you could think of. Nowadays we can get a starter kit for IoT experiments for only 15–20 USD, so it’s pretty achievable even for beginners. During the conference we had visited an awesome workshop about it and created a simple app for such devices. We will definitely order a few of such kits for experiments during the UPTech days.
Security in Android
Information security is crucial these days and mobile apps aren’t an exception so we should pay attention on its protection as well. It’s almost impossible to make an app totally secured, but we have to protect it as much as possible.
Few basic steps for avoiding vulnerabilities in mobile apps are: use HTTPS for network requests, do not use SharedPreferences or DB to store sensitive data without encryption, etc. It’s important to remember that the level of protection(security of encryption) is usually inversely proportional to performance, so better to find balance in that. Also, we should remember that Android before API 23(Android 6.0) has poor encryption mechanisms. To learn a bit more about security, read our article.
Android Instant Apps
Instant App — is a great opportunity for attracting new clients to your mobile app. The key distinction of such apps is instant access to some part of functionality without downloading a whole application, which may have size 40–60+ MB. In that case, users can open links in these instant apps, it’s something similar to deep linking but without installing the application. Such approach may be really useful for eCommerce products.
However, there are restrictions on it. First of all and the most important is app size — it should be less than 4 MB, so developers should take it into account while making architecture decisions. Modular structure is a key component to keep up with all size constraints. Such approach might be a real pain for already created apps in production. It brings us again to the point that the architecture is big deal when you start a new project.
New way to configure your Gradle build
This year Kotlin caused a lot of discussions and a bit of hype😉 in Android world and today it’s pretty often used for app development instead or alongside with Java. One more sphere where this language could be used is writing Gradle build scripts. I guess Kotlin DSL has good prospects in that area. It has a lot of advantages over Groovy, which we are using now: static typing, good IDE support (docs, suggestions, autocomplete) but it’s not ready for production usage yet because of problems with compatibility with Groovy (most or commonly used plugins are written with it), problems are related to dynamic typing of it.
The program of all 4 threads was really intensive with lots of interesting lectures and there were situations when we wanted to be in several places at one time, and we had to decide where to go and what to choose. Sometimes, instead of making such decisions we just split — one part of the team visited workshop and another listened to lectures and then we shared key points and other important information. We’ve visited two codelabs: “Secure data in Android” and “Firebase and IoT” and they both were really interesting.
Small life hack: after the conference you get recordings of all lectures, so you will be able to watch them even if you miss some.
As you probably know conferences it’s not only lectures and workshops. They are perfect places for networking. GDG DevFest wasn’t exception, there was enough time for networking with attendees and speakers. We had a chance to communicate with lectors, ask them questions about their presentations and share out feedback. Such activities are pretty useful because it a great opportunity to discover something new about technologies and development processes in different companies.
We should also mention that the level of organization was really high — each and every part was great. Not that you usually expect from such a big conference in Ukraine. Thanks to Google Developers Group (GDG) Lviv for that. We already look forward to visit GDG DevFest Ukraine 2018.
We hope these notes helped you get the spirit of the events and learn something new. If you would like to read more key takeaways from tech events (next one is Web Summit), subscribe to our blog and 👏
