As my old colleague felt the usual title for this post “Bye Bye {Year}” to be a bit negative, I have changed it to “Year in Review”, which is what this post ultimately about.

This is a followup post to my earlier post which listed the internal codenames that were used by the official Android Messages app. It ended with them coming to the end of the Alphabetic order with “Zither” and another update with “Nose Flute”.

A new version has now been released!

Just after the hard work on Message Counter was completed and the app was released to the public, I have taken up another major app rewriting task. This time it’s LibAeApps.

September marks a Major milestone for a hobby Android app. What started as a proof of concept back in 2013 has now reached Version 4 and close to a total of 1,00,000 downloads.

The latest release of Android Messages app from Google had just hit the playstore featuring Material Theme. I was able to trace back the internal codenames of the app.

With Version 4.0 of Message Counter around the corner, lets take a look at the history of the icons for the app.

Message Counter was using a background service to start an SMS Content Observer. While upgrading the app to target the latest Android API, it appeared that the service was killed after around 1 minute of the application went to the background.

This proved challenging for the app’s functionality until further research led to…

Ever since Google made Kotlin the official language of Android, I had tried to look at it. As usual I tried it out as part of RandomContact app and just used a few simple features and found it to be consice and powerful. So when I wanted to rewrie MessageCounter app to make use of Android Architecture Components, I decided to jump all in and rewrite the entire app in Kotlin. Below are few snippets that I came across and liked a lot.

All of a sudden there was this announcement from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. I have been a member of Github since 2012 and have most of my Open Source projects as well as this blog hosted there. My first thought was “there goes my cloud repo”.