Key Android takeaways from DevFest Ukraine 2017
The 6th annual conference GDG DevFest Ukraine — the biggest one related to Google technologies in CEE — was held on October 13–14, 2017 in Lviv, Ukraine. The conference was powered by Google Developers Group Lviv (GDG Lviv) together with Google Developer Groups from all over Ukraine. 2 days full of Android, Web and Cloud! Top-notch speakers from companies like Google, Intel, Twitter, Atlassian, Twilio, Microsoft, Runtastic, and Telerik.
Takeaway 1: “To be a better developer, you have to be a product owner”.
At opening keynote, Yonatan Levin shared honestly all his failures and successes in creating products, and the truth about having his own startups. The idea of the talk was that to become a better developer you have to understand your users, understand problems you can solve for them.
Presentation slides: http://bit.ly/2hHn72e
Video recording: https://youtu.be/hUY8jg9-ieE
Takeaway 2: Android app security is nowhere close to perfect.
Have you ever suffered when someone has hacked your app?
Marcos Placona (Twilio, androidsecurity.info) started his talk by hacking into an Android app directly on the stage! During the presentation, he shared common techniques that will help protect sensitive information within an application:
- Encrypt everything
- Utilize native platform security features as much as possible
- Enable certificate pinning
- Do not trust anyone! Ok, only do not trust client and check if the app is debuggable, certificate fingerprints match, is it an emulator or device is rooted.
Presentation slides: http://bit.ly/2A7hKQs
Video recording: https://youtu.be/GrLYrJ-aNSE
To add on the topic Yakiv Mospan and Svyatoslav Hromyak from Team Technologies prepared a workshop on how to use Encryption and Fingerprint API to secure your app. You can go through the workshops on your own, the demo app and the guide is available on the GitHub.
Takeaway 3: IoT boom is happening and Android community knows how to deal with it. Almost.
Anton Minashkin (Chief Software Engineer at EPAM Systems) answered questions “what we can do”, “what we should do” and “how to survive” in a brave new world of IoT if you are a mobile developer. Anton also mentioned limitations and learnings from his experience working with Android Things.
Presentation slides: http://bit.ly/2zei2pi
Video recording: https://youtu.be/NCRr4nA0c7A
Also, attendees had a chance to build a simple smart home device based on ESP8266 board connected via Firebase hosted by Jaroslav Khorishchenko. Sources for the workshop as well as the guide are available on GitHub.
Takeaway 4: Google is doing a new take on cross platform mobile development with Flutter.
Tim Messerschmidt has shown how to build high-performing, modern and beautiful multi-platform mobile apps using an open-source Flutter SDK. It is fast, it is hot and if you are a web developer, you can use Dart programming language to write your apps.
Presentation slides: http://bit.ly/2zx2nEI
Video recording: https://youtu.be/0IY6J5baAj8
Takeaway 5: The UX of apps running in the background is more important than the foreground.
Have you ever realized that 95% of the time our mobile apps are in the background? Britt Barak has shared how to make app pop and shine when it is asleep, using brand new Android O features, notifications, shortcuts, and animated launcher icons.
Presentation slides: http://bit.ly/2xZYymY
Video recording: https://youtu.be/0IY6J5baAj8
Takeaway 6: Kotlin API for Gradle looks great, but is not ready for the prime time. Yet.
Groovy is a great language to define a DSL, but flexibility comes with a price. Supporting apps written in the dynamically typed languages can turn to into a nightmare. That’s why the Android Gradle plugin is written in Java.
Kotlin combines the type safety of Java with the ability to define powerful DSLs like Groovy. In his talk, Michael Pustovit shared where are the limitations of the Kotlin DSL for Gradle. A spoiler: it’s too early to write production build scripts in Kotlin. Why? See the full talk.
Presentation slides: http://bit.ly/2zxGl4U
Video recording: https://youtu.be/XLNJkxWoCoc
Takeaway 7: Google finished the war between Android architectures.
MVC, MVP, MVVM, M-whatever. For last couple of years, Android developers were actively discussing what architecture is better. Finally at I/O Google finished the war. Architecture components were introduced — a collection of libraries to simplify working with the Activity lifecycle, databases, and UI events.
At DevFest Ukraine, Yonatan Levin shared how to use the newly introduced components like LiveData, ViewModel, and LifecycleObserver. Key point: for existing apps it doesn’t make sense to refactor to the new architecture, but for new apps — it’s definitely the go-to option.
Presentation slides: http://bit.ly/2ywubsH
Video recording: https://youtu.be/FzmDFscF41o
Takeaway 8: It was not an ordinary community conference
Eliza Camber (Android developer @ Pixplicity) has written on her blog:
“…This is not anything close to how an average community event kicks off. It was closer to a Google organized event than to a Google’s community event. Music, lights, cameras, smokes and an amazing intro video that set everyone to the right mood!… ”
Slides, recordings, photos
All Sessions recordings are available here http://bit.ly/dfua17-all.
All Android sessions: http://bit.ly/dfua17-android.
All Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/gdglviv
Highlights photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sKx8x4DP9MLmbw2G3
Wanna hear more?
The organizers are insane. Even before finishing this year’s edition they announced GDG DevFest Ukraine 2018. Lviv, October 12th-13th, IMAX screens and hundreds of Android developers. Sound interesting? More info is here.
Stay tuned for upcoming local events on Android by visiting lviv.gdg.org.ua and subscribing to #dfua news in Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
