6. Starting afresh with Android Development

Hey! Welcome to Since Last Commit, a publication where I share all of my learnings while building Android applications. These days, I am building the Hangar App, more about that later.

I started Since Last Commit as a way of documenting my journey in Android development. That journey has been on and off throughout the last few months. Other priorities came in the way and I slowly started to lose focus on how I wanted to approach my learning during my spare time. All I knew is that I wanted to continue building Android apps and learn new things along the way. And of course share them with you. I am not sure what this will achieve in the end, but I do want to pivot and start afresh.

As you know, I am building the Hangar app. It is a simple Android app that helps you keep track of your personal belongings. The app has some basic features and not that many users. So I figured that it is a perfect opportunity to stop and start all over again. Rewrite is not always bad. This is my side-project after all. I have learned a lot in the past few months and I feel starting fresh might be more productive. I have many ideas that I want to implement and certain decisions I would make differently. At the end of the day, I want to build a better application.

Hangar Android App

Hangar is not going away. It is being paused until I rewrite some portions of the app. Hence, you might see the following screen in the app soon; however, the app will still be usable. While I may stop releasing updates, I will spend more time learning and writing more content.

First and foremost, I would introduce Jetpack Compose to my project. Hangar is currently built on top of the traditional Android view system with view binding. Although there is nothing wrong with that, I would personally want to spend more time developing in Compose and have personally felt it to be a better and faster way to develop UI features. Second, I would like to refocus on solving the problem at hand. Hangar provides a solution to a small problem. I would like to further invest in building the right thing in solving that problem for the users. Lastly, I would like to integrate newer technologies to give flexibility and convenience in solving the problem at hand to make it more than just a simple app.

I am quite excited for this one. Jetpack Compose is something I enjoy working with. I created an open source project where I will be trying out new things with Compose that are a bit too crazy or random for the Hangar app. It will be a playground app to try out experiments. You can follow along with journey at https://github.com/asadmansr/the-compose-gazette

My question for you is…

Do you have anything in the works to build or learn for this year? I would be curious to learn more about it!

Catch you on the next post…