Things every android developer should know - part 3

Description: In this post I'm gonna demonstrate some useful tips which we could come handy in our app development life cycle

Also check out Part 1 and Part 2.

So let 's get started.

1. Grant all permissions at once in Marshmallow and above.  

GIST Snippet Here

As we know marshmallow compatible apps require permissions. So we normally show permission dialog to the user asking to grant us. That's fine. But every time clicking that 'allow' feels annoying for developers.

So the idea is to allow all the permissions at once without every time clicking the allow button.

Below  shell script will help to make it happen flawlessly.

#!/bin/sh

#add your package_name
PACKAGE=com.app.code2concept

#create array with all the permission you need to enabled    
PKG_ARRAY='android.permission.CALL_PHONE
        android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS
        android.permission.READ_SMS
        android.permission.READ_CONTACTS
        android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION
        android.permission.CAMERA
        android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE'

#lets exceute our command
for permissions in $PKG_ARRAY; 
do
 echo $permissions + ' granted'
 adb shell pm grant $PACKAGE $permissions
done

echo 'Bingo its done'

OUTPUT:

$ sh grant_all_permissions.sh
android.permission.CALL_PHONE +  granted
android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS +  granted
android.permission.READ_SMS +  granted
android.permission.READ_CONTACTS +  granted
android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION +  granted
android.permission.CAMERA +  granted
android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE +  granted
Bingo its done'

Before


After

2. Battery Historian

Battery historian translate the battery stats into visualization form thereby helping us to figure out whats the cause and how we can optimized our battery usage.

Pre-requisite:
1. 'adb' is configured
2. Devices is detectable using 'adb devices' command
3. Python(2.7)  is install and path is set.

Step 1: Reset the battery stats to fetch fresh info using below

adb shell dumpsys batterystats --reset

Note: Disconnect phone and explore the app for few minutes and connect again

Step 2: Capture 'batterystats' using below command

adb shell dumpsys batterystats > batterystats.txt

Note: The command creates a file name 'batterystats.txt' into the current directory

Step 3: Clone or download the Github repo of 'Battery Historian' from Here. You will find a python script at path '../battery-historian/scripts/historian.py'

Note: You can keep both 'historian.py' and 'batterystats.txt' in the same folder for ease

Step 4: Finally let execute the python script against our 'batterstats.txt' as input as show below

python historian.py batterystats.txt > batterystats.html

This will create 'battertstats.html' fig.1 which we can use to analyse the battery usage as shown HERE.

fig.1

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Things every android developer should know - part 1

Description: In this post, I'm gonna demonstrate tools that help solve some common problems while app development & help increase the speed as well.

So let's get started :-)

1. How to run app on phone without USB cord.(need USB initially to make connection) 

Note: Android Studio has provided a more sophisticated option to connect without USP using wireless debugging. Do check out the blog

Step 1: Connect the device with the cord to your system. Ensure that USB debugging is enabled from Developer options. Open cmd(windows) or Terminal(Linux) run the command. You'll find the connected device.

adb kill-server && adb devices

Step 2: Run the next command to restart in tcp mode on port 5555

adb tcpip 5555

Step 3: Now disconnect your device from the system and note down your ip address of the phone from Setting > About Phone > Status. 

E.g It could be something like 192.168.0.3(IP address) Now run the final command by replacing it with your IP address

adb connect 192.168.0.3:5555

Bingo we're done now your device is connected and you can run it wirelessly :-)

2. How to find SHA1 key from android studio?

SHA1 key is needed in many different apps containing maps or social sites authentication or using any Google apps and services. It's super useful. So the simplest way to get that is using Android Studio.

Step 1: Select the Gradle projects from the right pane and expand Tasks > Android> signingReport. (fig.1).

Note: If you do not find your project in Gradle Projects sync the project from Android Studio.

fig.1

3. Best way to create icons for android app using vector asset.

Many times in our development we need icons for small things with varied colors or shape. Using Vector Asset in Android Studio we can create our icons with super ease.

Step 1: Right-click on app > New > Vector Asset you'll see Fig. 3. You can choose Material Icons which contains a whole lot of icons in different categories. This will create <vector> for the icon you have selected. (fig.4) in drawable folder

fig.3

Vector Asset for the icon

fig.4

Step 2: Awesome now just we can simply set it to background or src of ImageView and other widgets.

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