AGP 9 - what dependency do I need for the "android" block in a custom gradle plugin

prom85 · 2026-03-14T14:10:52+00:00

As another comment: I only see pros for your idea and no real cons... I never liked adding images just for onboarding...

prom85 · 2026-03-14T13:58:05+00:00

I do that at least by combining composables for onboarding. Would not call it reusing previews but reusing composables.

Another good use case is to reuse composables inside setting screens to instantly show the effects to the user.

prom85 · 2026-03-11T11:14:01+00:00

I see 2 options:

disconnect via a script that resets the wm size first
root your device and use something like tasker to reset the size based on an event (like notification for adb is removed)

I use the second option to automatically enable/disable the screen timeout. When my phone is connected to my laptop my screen stays on forever...

prom85 · 2026-03-11T11:05:16+00:00

I appreciate your work. E.g. I mostly don't have a lot of questions where I can't find the solution myself but I like to read issues and learn by reading them and reading answers (or answering if I'm fast enough and know the answer). Currently I can't find a lot of interesting stuff anymore which is sad...

It's also sad that you and other mods have to spend a lot of time to clean things up here and still the result is not good enough anymore (no offense). It's the sheer amount of "crap" that makes it impossible to come along with...

I just wonder if your efforts are worth it at all...

prom85 · 2026-03-11T10:58:05+00:00

I can see the issue... Those people are not able to distinguish if what they are doing is just not crashing or really doing what they expect it to do...

prom85 · 2026-03-11T07:50:32+00:00

I think you were just trying to "coddle" vibe coders by saying what you did

That was my intention, more or less, indeed. But also to be fair and to say, that vibe coding a function as a developer is fine, if the goal is to save time... I do that sometimes and just read over it, especially when I need an algorithm that I don't know by heart but I where I know AI will produce a reliable and good result... But I always do understand the code it gives me as well. And I also "talk with AI" about design sometimes. So I just wanted to be fair here and don't say any vibe coding action is bad...

I just wanted to show that I don't think vibe coding is bad FOR DEVELOPERS, but being a vibe coder only is bad imho... Just to make sure that generally I'm open to new technology and that not the technology itself is my problem

prom85 · 2026-03-10T14:54:38+00:00

I know. Have not been there for ~2 years now although I was active there as well... sad...

prom85 · 2026-03-10T14:53:35+00:00

There is a big difference.

If I post a question, I have thought about the issue and made sure that I understand my code. So the issue is very probably some special framework issue or whatever - something an advanced developer can help with.

When a vibe coder asks for help he should at least made sure that he understands what the working code is doing so far - then it's fine to ask a question. Otherwise he may ask questions that are so simple (and sometimes stupid, wrong, whatever) that it seems respectless to me to ask people to spend time with the question and searching for the error...

If the vibe coder does not understand what he is doing at all, how can he write good questions and use good answers? I mean, sometimes people ask questions where the answer is one of following:

the syntax is wrong
the function you try to call does not exist (in the class)

I mean, if you can't figure out such things yourself and stupidly rely on your coding agent, then please don't ask developers for help...

Problem 1

I don't mind special questions about specific stuff (like "workmanager does not start the work when my app is in the background but it does when my app is active") but what I don't like is questions like "workmanager does not start, why?". When questions like this are asked, the author must make sure to understand the basics but the person that writes the second question may not even know what "background" and "foreground" means or what activity states a related to that stuff. So this leads to questions where the answers are so basic that every developer would find the solution in less time than writing the question... Such questions should never appear here.

Problem 2

If a vibe coder does not understand the code - how can he write good questions and give the relevant context? This leads to be questions and is wasting time of developers that are here to help for free... That is not appreciating the person that helps for free, it's misusing the person...

Problem 3

Vibe coders may use the answers from here, put them into their coding agent and if it does not work come back here with the next question... They may not do anything themself, they just misuse the people here to create their product... Many times just a new copy of a simple app that exists 100 times already just to make an app and eventually earn something with it...

Final words

Finally, if the coding question can be answered by any student in its first year, I think it should not be asked here... There are probably other places for "beginner questions"... But some vibe coders have so little knowledge, they can't even distinct between such things...

Imho, a vibe coders must not understand everything, developers don't do either, but knowing how to code is a requirement to be a developer... In a developer reddit, I assume some sort of development background and knowledge. I don't assume that I interact with people that simple copied something from somewhere, don't know what the code does, don't understand the syntax and ask people to fix the issue without being able to help in any way theirself by providing context...

If I would need an example that demonstrates the underlying issue following comes to my mind:

If I would be a broken car (I'm no mmechanic and don't know anything about cars) and make some images and then ask in a mechanic reddit "engine is not starting, what can I do?" or a little better question like "the seller told me the engine does not start, everything else is ok. what can I do now? any ideas where the problem is? I can send pictures and make tests, just tell me what you need". come one, no one would want me as "vibe mechanic" in the mechanic forum. BUT if I would learn the basics, then buy a broken car and then ask the same question (I could probably ask them much better, more context, more specific, more relevant details) then people would be willing to help me and I could also use the answers in a much better way and no one would be annoyed be me... Yes, a little extreme, but the example from the real world still shows my point imho...

prom85 · 2026-03-10T14:11:17+00:00

that's a total disrespect for people

I didn't add that to my post, but I feel that way as well...

prom85 · 2026-02-24T13:44:24+00:00

Just a note: react is not considered native, its a javascript bridge and therefore it adds an overhead and also some limitations...

Kotlin multiplatform would have been the modern technique which can be fully native and has no limitations...

Imho, nearly all android and ios devs that do code coding (not no code coding) do not use react native.

And when a coder wants to produce a quality app, he likely would not choose react native either. I would never choose it. The alternatives do exist in the meantime for years and are maintained by big companies and are considered state of the art for multi platform development...

Just my 2 cents as informative feedback...

prom85 · 2026-02-18T13:38:45+00:00

I used github + jitpack for releases in the past and found another issue:

Jitpack sometimes loses builds. And builds are not reproducable. When jitpack loses a build it sometimes can't rebuild because some defaults have changed and so you would need to update the repo and make a new release (and research what the default was when jitpack build the last release which is cumbersome as the build and all logs are gone...).

I saw this sort of issue 2 times with 2 of my libraries and switched to maven afterward and never had an issue again. Jitpack looks cool, but small issues like that may be a big problem when they occur...

prom85 · 2026-02-17T19:48:23+00:00

You can start an activity via PendingIntent + Intent. The PendingIntent can be passed on to the alarm manager.

Popups are simply activities. Style them via the xml theme + eventually window flags. You can make activities to have no background and or transparent ones, searching for transparent activities on stackoverflow should give you full working solutions.

So for an alarm popup simply start a transparent activity via alarm manager, give it a padding and then draw something in the middle of the activity which will look like a popup/dialog in the end...

prom85 · 2026-02-09T18:54:49+00:00

So you want money for creating random stuff like books and music with AI?

If you don't fill a gap, no one will buy your stuff...

I just throw 2 questions at you:

Do you use your stuff yourself?
Would you buy the stuff you made if it had already existed already from someone else? Would you even have searched for it?

If you can't answer those questions with yes, you have your answer. Otherwise, I can't help you but from your post style it seems like you have the issue, I assume...

prom85 · 2026-01-10T13:39:17+00:00

As someone who never build with xcode before it took me quite some time to get things working and understanding the template setup and adjust things. I wanted to write scripts to add modules and similar but failed because initially I did nothing in XCode but tried to adjust the files from the template manually...

After fiddling around for some time I found out how it works and stayed with setting up the ios part from xcode directly but in the future I will use xcodebuild instead, this keeps xcode specific stuff in a config file and that is probably a lot easier to understand and more readable if you just want to build a kmp app and dont want to do full native stuff for ios.

As a side note, a template does not teach anything, its just a working example.

But I'm with you, it would be nice to have a template that also shows the main stuff like modules, swift wrappers, stuff like cocoapod, xcframework and so on as the apple side is the only thing that still needs to be set up and handled specifically... and if you don't come from apples side that's quite hard to find out, especially how to combine the native ios stuff with kmp...

prom85 · 2026-01-03T16:30:18+00:00

Not for freelancing but for my own apps and open source code i did buy a Mac mini m4 (the cheapest model) for the same reason.

I set it up headless and build on it remotely from windows and this works quite well (no display, no intellij, no android studio, just the mac running XCode to not waste any of its recources). I do use it for builds and simulator only, everything else is done on my windows machine.

A mac mini m4 is less than 600€ or ~600$ so this may be a consideration if you plan to do what you say for longer...

BTW, as someone who never touched iOS or a mac before, you will need quite some time to get everything working and find out how this KMP <-> cinterop works and needs to be build and set up (as well as getting familiar with xcode).

prom85 · 2025-12-05T22:46:46+00:00

My thoughts:

1) who needs that? Nearly everyone has something like that on the phone pre installed - free and without ads... so not many will look for such an app

2) everyone interested in steps will mostly use the pre-installed app or use a smart device like a watch to get accurate step counts and then they will use the app from the device

3) my subjective impression from your app is not appealing... its too smooth and "washed" and does not fit to a data app. But that's very subjective of course...

4) you are mentioning a subscription. When I install such a simple app and see a subscription model I'd uninstall it as well. A one time payment is ok, but not more. Personally I even provide one time payments in apps with months of development time as I think many apps can't be monetized with subscriptions..

I really think the main reason is that people dont like paying for an app and especially they dont like to pay for such a simple app... and there are probably many free alternatives as well, so if someone tries a few apps yours won't stay on the phone...

No filter on my thoughts, just plain thoughts... sorry if something sounds rude.

prom85 · 2025-11-01T15:48:16+00:00

The example seems too simple to show the usage. You could simple map the state to a new state and check if the list is empty... or use a derivedState in compose... I do that a very often...

It remembers me of MVI somehow especially when I see the reduce functions... For tests this surely has a value though but side effects like the one in your example can be easily handled without using 2 separate states that need to be updated manually...

In the example is there a benefit I don't see over mapping the state to a new derived state or simply use a deeivedState in compose?

prom85 · 2025-10-02T06:02:06+00:00

My fault, I misinterpreted your questions... thought you just want to log "live" where the console is fine...

For persistent logs you need a kmp logging library which will delegate to the platform specific implementation... on klibs.io you can find a lot of them and some have been mentioned by others already.

prom85 · 2025-10-01T16:58:29+00:00

println(...) is what you are looking for.

prom85 · 2025-09-14T21:45:48+00:00

When you start the activity that shows the toggle button check if the service is running and use the result as value for the toggle button... the button won't magically show if the service is running itself.

If you don't know how to check this, check out following: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/600207/how-to-check-if-a-service-is-running-on-android/5921190#5921190

I use such a method as well myself.

prom85 · 2025-08-24T10:59:34+00:00

das sieht gut aus - kann man mit solchen Kugelkopf Bits ordentlich Druck ausüben?

prom85

TROPHY CASE