标签：#Mobile

Digital wallets are secure, since even if you lose your phone, they're protected by your lock screen. But you can disable your wallet to be safe.

Text-to-Speech Is Not a speak() Call The challenge 🧪 If you have ever assumed Text-to-Speech on Android is straightforward, this article is for you. But first, let us test your skills. Think you can make this speak on Android? 🙏 अव्यक्तोऽयमचिन्त्योऽयमविकार्योऽयमुच्यते । "Invisible, beyond thought, unchanging." — Krishna describing the nature of the self. Today is World Sanskrit Day, so the timing is fitting. 🕉️ Try playing it on the plain TextToSpeech API that Google provides — but specifically with a Sanskrit voice. Build a minimal Android app, initialize the TTS engine, set the language to Sanskrit, and call speak() on this string. Chances are it will not speak anything. Not even a single letter would be uttered. 🔇 That is the moment when a developer realizes that TTS is not a simple API call. The twist 🔄 Use a Marathi or Hindi voice instead. Same engine. Same text. Same API call. It plays perfectly. 🗣️ Same engine. Same verse. Different voice. Completely different result. The boundary between "speakable" and "not speakable" is not at the engine level. It is at the voice level within the engine. The Sanskrit voice within Google's TTS engine cannot handle this verse. But the Marathi voice — which shares much of the same Devanagari character set — handles it without issue. This changes how you think about TTS integration. What happened in production 🏭 This is not a theoretical exercise. This is what we actually hit. In Bhagavad Gita, the player screen uses TTS to read verses aloud. The experience is designed to feel like playing a media file: continuous, flowing, uninterrupted. But certain words — especially compound words and special conjunct characters — were being silently skipped. Not errored. Not logged. Just... silent. The engine would skip the entire word if it couldn't speak something in it. So a verse that should take 15 seconds to read would finish in 8. The user would hear a flowing recitation with missing pieces and never know what was lost. 😶 The worst

Getting a rejection email from App Review feels personal. It usually isn't. Apple runs the same review process against every submission, and most rejections trace back to a small number of guidelines that come up again and again. Knowing which ones, and what they actually mean, turns a vague rejection into a fixable checklist. How often this actually happens Apple's own 2024 App Store Transparency Report puts real numbers on this. Out of 7.77 million app submissions reviewed that year, 1.93 million were rejected, roughly 25%. Of those, 295,109 were fixed and approved on resubmission. Separately, 82,509 already-live apps were removed after the fact, most commonly for guideline or design violations (42,252), followed by fraud (38,315). Apple hasn't published a breakdown of rejections by specific guideline number, so treat any listicle claiming "62% of rejections are X" as unsourced. What Apple has said, in its own commentary alongside the report, is that the most common drivers, in order, are performance and bugs, legal issues, design problems, business-model (payment) violations, and safety risks. That ordering lines up with the specific guidelines below. The guidelines that actually catch people These are pulled directly from Apple's current App Store Review Guidelines, not paraphrased from a third party. Guideline 2.1, App Completeness. Covers crashes, obvious bugs, placeholder content, broken demo accounts, and non-functional in-app purchases. If a reviewer can't get past your login screen or your app crashes on launch, this is the line it gets cited under. It's the single most avoidable category, because it's the one you can actually test yourself before submitting. Guideline 4.2, Minimum Functionality. Your app has to be more than "a repackaged website." Apple wants "lasting entertainment value or adequate utility." A thin wrapper around a web view, with no native functionality added, gets flagged here. A sub-clause, 4.2.6, specifically targets apps built from c

A Technical PM's journey from frustration to shipping a solo Android app As a Technical Project Manager, I track time constantly. Client hours, project phases, billable work. It's part of the job. But every time tracker I tried left me frustrated. Toggl is powerful — too powerful. Every time I opened it, I had to navigate through workspaces, projects, tags, and integrations I'd never use. Clockify felt the same. Harvest was built for teams, not for someone who just wants to know where their day went. And don't get me started on the design. Most of these apps look like they were built in 2012 and never updated. So I did what any slightly obsessive PM would do: I built my own. The Problem I Was Actually Solving It wasn't that existing trackers lacked features. It was that they had too many. Every morning I'd open an app, get overwhelmed by options, and either spend 2 minutes setting up a timer correctly or just give up and track nothing. By the end of the week, I had no idea where my billable hours went — which meant I was probably undercharging clients. I wanted one thing: tap a button, start tracking. That's it. Building Tempo as a Non-Developer Here's the part that still surprises me: I built Tempo without writing a single line of code. As a Technical PM, I understand systems, workflows, and user experience — but I'm not a developer. I used AI tools to go from idea to a fully functional Android app in 2–3 months. The process wasn't always smooth. There were bugs, confusing UX decisions, and moments where I questioned whether I was building something anyone else would actually use. But I kept coming back to the same question: would I use this every day? And the answer was always yes. What Tempo Does (and Doesn't Do) Tempo is deliberately minimal: One tap to start tracking **— no setup, no forms, no friction **Billable vs non-billable toggle — know exactly what to invoice Daily & weekly reports — see where your time actually goes Custom projects with icons and colors

Clearing cache is a handy troubleshooting step, but you shouldn't use it all the time. Reckless use can actually slow your apps and devices down for a while.

What do you want from a flip phone when it's closed? A simple interface, perhaps notifications and a widget or two, for handling the basics? Or a fully fledged Android experience shrunk down for the Flip form factor? For years, Samsung has insisted on the former, even as some fans - and Razr rival Motorola […]

The atmosphere in the room was dense, the kind where every whisper echoes. I was sitting in the third row of a local community center during a Friday prayer session, my head bowed in reflection. Suddenly, a high-pitched, synthetic ringtone shattered the silence. My pocket vibrated violently, sending a jolt of anxiety through my chest. I scrambled to silence it, but the damage was done; a dozen heads turned in my direction. I wasn't just embarrassed; I was frustrated with myself for the thousandth time for forgetting the simple task of toggling a silent switch. This wasn't an isolated incident. I found myself constantly caught in a cycle of human error. I would arrive at the office, launch into a deep-work sprint, and realize two hours later that my phone had been chirping with notifications through three separate meetings. Then, I would leave the office and forget to turn the ringer back on, missing urgent calls from family throughout the evening. The friction wasn't in the hardware; it was in the expectation that a human should perfectly manage a state machine that they interact with hundreds of times a day. I realized that my phone was intelligent enough to track my location, calculate prayer times, and sync my schedule, yet it remained stubbornly passive regarding its own audio profile. Most existing automation tools were either too heavy, draining the battery within hours, or relied on cloud-based triggers that failed the moment I lost signal. I wanted something that lived on the device, respected the user's privacy, and handled the transition between 'Silent', 'Vibrate', and 'Normal' states without me ever needing to touch the screen. The goal was simple: build a background service that watches the world and adjusts the phone's volume automatically. I needed an architecture that could handle geofencing, calendar events, and time-based triggers without turning the device into a space heater. When I started building the geofencing engine for Muffle, the immediate

An AI agent phone is a real, or cloud-hosted, smartphone that an LLM-powered agent can operate on its own. It sees the screen, taps, swipes, types, opens apps, and completes multi-step tasks the same way a person would. Instead of calling an API, the agent uses the phone directly, the same Instagram, banking, or delivery app you'd use, driven by a model instead of a thumb. The phrase gets used two ways in 2026. Some products sell phone numbers for AI agents, voice and SMS. That's not this. Here, an AI agent phone means the device itself as something an agent controls, a full Android or iOS handset that becomes an autonomous actor. If you've heard the pitch give your AI agent a phone, this is it. Why a phone, not a browser? Most agent tooling lives in the browser, or in desktop computer use. That misses where people actually are. The world is mobile-first, and a huge share of real workflows are app-only, ride-hailing, food delivery, mobile banking, two-factor prompts, creator tools, regional super-apps. A browser agent can't install an APK, respond to a push notification, read an SMS one-time code, use the camera, or drive a native app that never ships a web build. A phone can. And there's a second reason: fidelity. When an agent operates the same app a customer uses, you're automating the real thing, not a mock, not some undocumented internal endpoint that breaks next release. How it works A mobile AI agent runs a perception-decision-action (PDA) loop against the device. The agent builds its understanding from two sources. First, the accessibility tree, the structured hierarchy of on-screen elements the OS exposes for screen readers, which gives precise, machine-readable targets. Second, vision, a screenshot passed to a multimodal model for anything the tree misses, canvas UIs, games, custom widgets. Together, the tree gives coordinates and vision gives context. The agent gets a goal in natural language, reasons about the current screen, picks the next action, and e

Google will start policing memory-hungry Android apps as a direct response to the RAM crisis. Spotted by TechCrunch, the company yesterday published a memo addressing the Play Store's role in enforcing new memory-usage restrictions. The post emphasizes the importance of meeting new memory usage limits for apps, in order "to help developers navigate industry-wide hardware […]

Recently, I built a mobile app with Expo; everything worked well with the development build on a simulator and a real device. Yet when I published the app to test the production build on a real device, it crashed without any explanation. With the crash, I had to get the crash report from Apple and download it to read it and try to understand the issue, yet even with that, I did not find any details that could help me, so I did what any normal guy during this age can do, I gave my code base to claude code and the crash report to anaylze them and tell me the issue. Guess what happened here? It hallucinated! Reading Claude's output made me feel I wasn't going in the right direction; for that reason, I had to go the old way: Stack Overflow and Reddit. Going to read the issues there helped me with three main extra things that AI does not provide: Knowing what other people tried: When I go to Stack Overflow or Reddit , I read the question, the thread, and other people's comments, even if it's not the correct one; this helps me get context, grasp the idea, and even learn some historical data about the issue. That might be the one I am facing. Sense of community: When I read other people's struggles and experiences, it gives me the feeling that I am not alone- not just me and a machine trying to prompt it to work- and it makes me feel that I belong to something bigger. It helps me keep up, not get frustrated, and feel that it's me who cannot solve issues with AI. Slow learning: Our brain does not remember the information when you read it once and forget it; we learn when we put effort and push the limits of our brain. With AI, this is getting easier by sending the question directly and getting the answer, so we forget even the issue if we face it again (spoiler alert: I had this exact issue a few months ago and forgot about it). That's why slow reading and similar methods help keep our brains alive and help us improve. With this, I am not saying to fully remove AI and not t

The Fan Edition phones are rarely Samsung's most exciting launches of the year, but the new Galaxy S26 FE feels especially familiar. Hardware-wise, little has changed since the S25 FE launched 12 months ago, and the upgrades have mostly come in the form of software tricks which themselves were already seen on this year's previous […]

The 9,210mAh dual-cell battery in the new Redmi Note 17 Pro Max is the biggest that Xiaomi has fit in any phone it's sold in Europe - and remarkably, in some other markets the phone comes with an even larger 10,000mAh single-cell design. As you can probably guess, this is a silicon-carbon battery either way, […]

By Shivkrishna Shah · Engineer Philosophy — @shivkrishnashah · @engineerphilosophy Your app shouldn't have a "no internet" screen. Here's the architecture I use to make mobile apps write locally, sync automatically, and survive the messy reality of field connectivity. Every mobile developer has shipped this screen at least once: a sad cloud icon and the words "No internet connection. Please try again." For consumer apps, that's an annoyance. For enterprise field apps — sales reps in hospital basements, auditors in warehouses, technicians in rural areas — it's a dealbreaker. If the app stops working when the signal drops, people stop trusting it. And once field users stop trusting an app, they go back to paper and WhatsApp. I spent the last few years building and maintaining an offline-first React Native platform used daily by field teams across multiple countries. This post is the architecture I wish someone had handed me on day one: how to structure local storage, detect connectivity, queue writes, auto-sync in the background, and avoid the two bugs that will absolutely bite you (duplicates and conflicts). Everything here is generic — I'll use Realm DB and NetInfo in the examples, but the pattern maps cleanly onto WatermelonDB, SQLite, or MMKV-backed queues. The one rule that changes everything The local database is the source of truth. The server is just a replica you happen to reconcile with. Most apps are built the other way around: the server is the truth, and the app is a thin cache over fetch() . Offline-first inverts this. Every read comes from the local DB. Every write goes to the local DB first. The network is an implementation detail that a background service worries about — never the UI. This single inversion gives you three things for free: Zero-latency UX. Saves are instant because they're local writes. No spinners on submit. Airplane-mode parity. The app behaves identically online and offline, because the UI never talks to the network. Crash safety. D

A technically perfect app can still fail. It can have clean code, modern architecture, powerful APIs, and impressive features—and still leave users uninstalling it, abandoning transactions, or switching to a competitor. Because users don't experience your code.They experience the product. That is why developers and businesses need to look beyond functionality and ask a more important question: “Does this software make the user’s life easier?” The Real Cost of a Poor Digital Experience Customer expectations are rising quickly. According to PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey, 70% of executives say customer expectations are evolving faster than their companies can adapt. Even more importantly, 29% of consumers said they stopped using or buying from a brand because of poor customer experience. That means a frustrating digital experience isn't simply a UX problem. It can become a business problem . A confusing checkout flow, slow screen, unnecessary registration step, broken search function, or poorly designed notification can turn a potential customer into a lost customer. And users rarely tell you exactly what went wrong. They simply leave. More Features Don't Always Mean More Value One of the biggest mistakes in software development is assuming that adding more features automatically makes a product better. It doesn't. Imagine an app with: 30+ features AI integration Multiple dashboards Complex personalization Advanced analytics …but users struggle to complete the one task they downloaded the app for. That's not innovation. That's friction. A better development approach starts with identifying the core user problem and then building around it. Before adding a feature, ask: What problem does this solve? If the answer isn't clear, the feature may not belong in the product. Performance Is Part of User Experience Developers often separate performance from UX. Users don't. To them, a slow API, delayed screen, frozen button, or failed transaction is simply a bad experien

If you are building an iOS app with Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) or Compose Multiplatform, you might have opened your generated Shared.h header at some point and wondered why it is 20,000+ lines long. I ran into this recently while optimizing one of my personal KMP apps. I kept seeing Objective-C classes generated for every single theme color, dimension constant, and internal state model, even though my Swift code never touched any of them. To get a clear picture of what was actually going on, I built a small Gradle plugin called kmprofiler . It parses the generated Objective-C header, scans your Swift source files, and highlights which exported declarations have zero call sites in Swift. The numbers on my app caught me off guard, but cleaning it up took just a few minutes. Why does Kotlin/Native export so much? In Kotlin, declarations are public by default. When targeting iOS, the Kotlin/Native compiler looks at every public class, top-level function, and property in your shared module and creates an Objective-C class interface and runtime method trampolines in the framework binary. The compiler cannot dead-strip these automatically because Objective-C relies on dynamic dispatch. It has to assume Swift or Objective-C could call them at runtime. If your UI is built with Compose Multiplatform or your Swift app only interacts with a couple of high-level bridge interfaces, most of those exported Objective-C wrappers end up being dead weight. The Audit: 459 Exports, 282 Unused When I ran kmprofiler on my app (Framed), it gave me this breakdown: ### 📊 KMP iOS Export Profile Export surface: 459 Kotlin declarations exported to Objective-C. No direct Swift call site found for 282 of them (61.4% uncalled). The unused exports mostly fell into three buckets: File Facades ( *Kt classes): Top-level properties in files like Dimens.kt (38 spacing constants) or Color.kt generated synthetic Objective-C classes like DimensKt with static getters for every single constant. Internal UI St

With the new design of Nothing OS 5.0, app icons and widgets can use adaptive color to get color tints pulled from your wallpaper, which update whenever your wallpaper changes. Alongside Android's built-in Dynamic Colors, the company says it allows you to have specific elements change to match your wallpaper "while Nothing's predominantly monochrome character […]

Nowadays most social and pen‑pal apps are built around speed. Swipe left, swipe right, quick short messages, endless notifications. Platforms reward fast replies and surface‑level first impressions. We can chat with dozens of people every day, yet many of us still feel lonely. Connections are easy to start, but rarely grow deep. Even some existing pen‑pal apps gradually move toward swipe‑driven matching, focusing heavily on profile pictures instead of real thoughts. I wanted something different. What if we slow everything down? What if friendship starts from long, thoughtful letters rather than instant small‑talk? That is the original idea behind SlowInk . I am a solo indie developer building this application with Flutter. My goal was not to make another popular social product. I just wanted to solve a pain I felt myself: missing genuine, low‑pressure cross‑cultural communication. During development, I made several intentional product trade‑offs: No swipe matching mechanism. You will not judge people within one second by just looking at avatars. No real‑time instant chat. Communication happens through complete letters. You take your time writing, and others take their time replying. Reduce noisy notifications. There is no pressure to reply immediately. Focus on long‑form writing, for language exchange and sincere pen‑pal friendship. These choices brought technical challenges. Building a letter‑first social system is quite different from building typical instant‑messaging software. I spent a lot of time thinking about user privacy, spam prevention, and how to keep the atmosphere gentle for global users. Many features got cut in order to keep the core idea intact. SlowInk is still an early‑stage project. It is far from perfect. There are bugs to fix and features to polish. As a side‑project developer without large‑team support, every improvement moves forward little by little. If you feel tired of fast‑paced swipe‑based social media, or you enjoy writing and receiving

Without thinking, I scribbled over what I'd just written. It's what I would have done if I was writing with pen and paper. But I didn't have a pen in my hand; my canvas was an LCD and the letters on my page were just pixels. Score one point to the TCL Note A1. TCL's […]

GrapheneOS, an open source version of Android that prioritizes security and privacy, has detailed its plans for supporting Motorola smartphones. Official support is set to arrive next year, starting with traditional flagships, before rolling out to Motorola's foldable phones and perhaps cheaper models, eventually. In a Mastodon thread, the GrapheneOS Foundation announced that it will […]

How to get a photo below a strict KB limit Many government portals, job forms, school applications, and support websites reject an otherwise valid photo because it is larger than a fixed limit such as 100 KB or 200 KB. Standard gallery apps usually offer cropping or a quality percentage, but they do not tell you whether the final file will meet a specific upload limit. That is the problem I built FormFit to solve on Android. Why exact-KB compression is tricky File size depends on more than width and height. Image detail, color variation, output format, and compression quality all affect the result. A quality setting that works for one photo may leave another photo far above the required size. FormFit works toward a maximum KB target and adjusts the generated copy for you. The practical goal is to create a file at or below the limit while keeping it as clear as possible. Compress a photo on Android Install FormFit from Google Play . Open the photo-compression tool and select the image you need to upload. Enter the maximum file size required by the website or form. Optionally resize the image dimensions or choose JPG, PNG, or WebP for the generated copy. Run the compression, review the result, and save or share the new file. The original photo is not replaced. FormFit creates a separate output copy, so you can compare the result before uploading it. Remove metadata from generated copies Photos can contain metadata such as device or capture information. When you only need to submit the visible image, FormFit can remove metadata from the generated copy. This does not change the original file. Turn several photos into one PDF Some forms ask for a single PDF instead of multiple image files. FormFit can combine up to 20 selected photos into one PDF directly on the phone. This is useful for receipts, scanned notes, application documents, and other small document sets. On-device processing The selected photos and PDFs are processed on the Android device. FormFit does not req