Troubleshooting Android Emulator: "Emulator: Process finished with exit code 1"

Emulator: Process finished with exit code 1 You opened AVD Manager in Android Studio and tried to start an AVD, you got “Emulator: Process finished with exit code 1”. Following are the steps to debug this Find out the name of the emulator. Click the down arrow 🔽 which is to the right of play arrow ▶️, to find out the name of the AVD. Let’s say the name is “Nexus_5X_API_28_x86”....

Circle CI vs Travis CI

Update: As of Mar 2022, I recommend everyone to use GitHub Actions I maintain a somewhat popular Android developer tool ( adb-enhanced). The tool is written in Python, supporting both Python 2 and 3. Testing the tool requires both Python runtime as well a running Android emulator. I, initially, used Travis CI for setting up continuous testing of this tool. Later, I felt that Travis CI was too slow and when I came across Circle CI, I decided to give it a try. As of now, both Travis and Circle CI are used for testing. Here is what I learned from my experience.

Android: Fragment related pitfalls and how to avoid them

Don’t use platform fragments ( android.app.Fragment), they have been deprecated and can trigger version-specific bugs. Use the support library fragments ( android.support.v4.app.Fragment) instead. A Fragment is created explicitly via your code or recreated implicitly by the FragmentManager. The FragmentManager can only recreate a Fragment if it’s a public non-anonymous class. To test for this, rotate your screen while the Fragment is visible. FragmentTransaction#commit can fail if the activity has been destroyed....

Android: Handling JPEG images with Exif orientation flags

A JPEG file can have Exif metadata which can provide the rotation/translation field information for a raw JPEG image. So, a landscape raw JPEG image could actually be a portrait because it’s EXIF orientation could be set to ORIENTATION_ROTATE_90, the best way to handle such scenarios is to either use a library like Picasso or Glide or at least learn from them. Here is a piece of code from Picasso which loads a JPEG as an in-memory bitmap and performs the right translation/rotation....

Cross-language bridge error handling: JS-to-Java Example

All languages have certain semantics for dealing with error cases. C deals with them by setting error codes. Java deals with them by throwing exceptions. JavaScript deals with them by throwing exceptions as well but unlike Java, it does have any concept of checked Exceptions. The JS interpreter just stops. And this has some interesting implications in hybrid scenarios like a Webview based app. Consider a simple Android app where most of the code is in JavaScript but is making a request to Java layer....

Testing resumable uploads

The core idea behind resumable upload is straightforward if you are uploading a big file, then you are going to encounter users in the network conditions where they cannot upload the file in a single network session. The client-side code, to avoid restarting the file upload from the beginning, must figure out what portion of the file was uploaded and “resume” the upload of the rest. How to do resumable upload Before starting the upload, send a unique ID generated from the file contents to the server like MD-5 or SHA-256....

Architecting Android apps for emerging markets

This is a long post. It covers several decisions like API version, distribution beyond play store, UI & network performance, and minimizing RAM, disk, and battery usage.

Google I/O 2018: Android Notes

Highlights All android support library code is moving to the androidx namespace. No more android.support.v4 or android. support.v7 namespaces. Android app bundle to split the app into downloadable modules Navigation library to set up navigation between different activities/fragments. Use WorkManager for background work - this is an improvement to JobScheduler Major improvements to Android Studio. Most standalone tools were deprecated in favor of adding the same functionality into Android Studio. Major improvements to Android Vitals which in Google Play to learn more about what’s going on with the Android app’s performance....

Application Not Responding (ANR)

Demystifying Android rendering: Jank and ANR

Almost everyone developing an Android app has seen something like this in their device logs. Default 1 I/Choreographer(1200): Skipped 60 frames! The application may be doing too much work on its main thread. On most devices, the Android platform tries to render a new frame every 16 milliseconds (60 fps). The rendering requires that whatever work is happening on the UI thread should finish in that timeframe (well, actually in less than that)....

Built-in "Developer options" in Android

Android has a few really good settings built right into the platform for debugging under a hidden “Developer Options” menu. You can turn them on via Settings -> About Phone -> Build Number (tap 7 times). The steps will be similar but might vary a bit across OEMs. In older versions of Android, this used to be an explicit option under the Settings tab. I find the following options to be useful for the development...