Backstage Blog

• Android
• Mobile

Last week, we open-sourced LightCycle, an Android library that helps break logic out of Activity and Fragment classes into small, self-contained components called LightCycles.

Components that typically need to be aware of Activity and Fragment lifecycle events include presenters, UI tracking code, input processors and more. We’ve been using LightCycle extensively in the SoundCloud Music & Audio and SoundCloud Pulse apps over the last year.

• Android
• Mobile

In part one we described how running into Android’s method limit may leave you unable to build, and offered strategies you can employ to make your app fit into a single DEX file. In this part we share an alternative option: using multiple DEX files.

• Android
• Mobile

At SoundCloud we have been building for the Android platform since 2010. Much has changed since then: the team has grown, the list of features has grown, and our audience has grown. Today, eight engineers are working full time on the official SoundCloud app, across various areas, with contributions pouring in from other parts of the organization. Due to the growing complexity and number of contributions, the app’s size has grown substantially. Currently the app consists of approximately 1200 Java source files, not counting tests, containing approximately 86000 lines of code. This doesn’t include native code, such as our playback or recording stacks.

We’re not the first to run into Android’s limits in terms of build tools. An internal limitation of Dalvik’s byte code format (DEX), which I will explain in more detail, can leave you unable to build after your codebase reaches a certain size. If you fail to anticipate this, it might happen during the most inconvenient time, such as when you are preparing for a release. Part of our job in Core Engineering at SoundCloud is to make sure our developers are happy and productive; not being able to build our app anymore makes for neither happy nor productive developers.

While there are a number of posts on this topic, I would like to describe in more detail what we have done to combat Android’s method limit, what things worked well and what didn’t work so well, what it actually means to use the dx tool’s --multi-dex switch and what you can do to improve application health with regards to size.

• Android

Both our Android and iOS teams use the reactive programming paradigm to simplify asynchronous, concurrent code in our native mobile apps. For Android, we use Netflix’s RxJava. Matthias Käppler—a SoundCloud engineer and a contributor to the RxJava Android library—blogs about the HOWs and WHYs of RxJava on Android.

Tomorrow in London, Matthias will be talking about RxJava at Droidcon. You can grab a drink with him and other members of our Android Team at the SoundCloud Droidcon Drinkup.

• Android
• Mobile

A common problem in Android development is that you need to jump off the main UI thread to retrieve data from an IO-based source. At SoundCloud, we use Netflix’s RxJava to simplify asynchronous flows in Android. In an interview given for the Google Developers series “root access Berlin”,  Mustafa Sezgin—who heads up our Mobile Team—explains why we chose RxJava, what it gives us, and he walks through an example-usage pattern:

If you are interested in more details, be sure to catch Matthias Käppler—from our Android Team—give an in-depth talk at Droidcon London…

• Announcements
• SDKs
• Android

Are you an Android developer and want to integrate SoundCloud in your own app? With the new Android Sharing Kit this has become very easy.

• Announcements
• SDKs
• Android

Alongside with the SoundCloud Android app we’ve created a new Java Wrapper for the SoundCloud API and today we can finally release it to the public!

It is simple to use, supports OAuth2 and requires a minimum of external dependencies so it should be easily embeddable in both desktop and mobile applications.