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Sriram

Android developer—among other things

  1. Building thumb-friendly apps

    Studies indicate that most people use a single hand and just the thumb while using their mobile devices 1. Keeping this in mind, it makes sense to design apps that are easy to navigate with just the thumb. Though it might seem a bad idea to design the app to suit the preference of only a percentage of total users, making an app ‘thumb-friendly’ benefits other users too.

    1. How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices? ↩
    …

    • on android ux design

  2. Share you wifi passwords easily with MyFi

    The Android OS uses a ‘mini’ version of wpa_supplicant1 for managing WiFi connnections and the configuration details for every WiFi connnection on your phone/tablet is stored in

    1. wpa_supplicant : ↩
    …

    • on android wifi passwords nfc app playstore download MyFi

  3. Building Android For New Devices

    If you’re building Android for a new device that’s still in development, you need to add it to the file at /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules to access the device1. To do this, you need the idProduct and idVendor of the new Android device. lsusb -v This command lists all the USB devices connected to the system and can be used to populate the 51-android.rules file.

    1. Configuring USB Access : ↩
    …

    • on android usb development

  4. Building the Android sdk

    In the root folder, . build/envsetup.sh
    lunch sdk-eng
    make sdk …

    • on android sdk building

  5. Accessibility Feature For The Color Blind

    This was my entry for UB Hackathon ‘15. My idea was to add a new accessibility feature for the color blind. People who are color blind are unable to distinguish between two colors. The most common type is the inability to distinguish between green and red. My solution was to to simply replace the green with blue, which is a combination that they can distinguish. …

    • on hackathon framework android accessibility settings jni native NDK

  6. Flashing a custom Android kernel

    I had a really hard time figuring out how to flash a custom kernel on my Android phone for one of my projects. Since I was pressed for time, I didn't have the luxury of following some of the really long guides on the Internet to get this working. And turns out, you don't have to. Once you have your kernel compiled and ready, and I'm assuming you know how to do that, all you have to do to flash it to the phone is to put the phone in fastboot mode, adb reboot bootloader And then you simply flash the zImage to the phone with the following command. fastboot flash zimage <path to compiled zImage file> And you're done. …

    • on kernel bootloader adb android

  7. Signing an Android app for a custom Android build

    If you want to sign your apps for a custom Android build, first find the keys you used to sign the build. They can be usually found in, <source directory>/build/target/product/security/ You will see a bunch of keys in the folder. Find the platform `pem` and `pk8` files and sign the app with the following command, java -jar <source dir>/prebuilts/sdk/tools/lib/signapk.jar <source dir>/build/target/product/security/platform.x509.pem <source dir>/build/target/product/security/platform.pk8 your-app.apk your-app-signed.apk …

    • on framework security android