Use A Broadcast Receiver For Background Services In Android

As an Android developer, you’ll often run into the scenario where you need to perform tasks and display notifications for your app in the background.

To retain battery power on our users device we are going to run background tasks using a broadcast receiver. This will prevent a thread from constantly running in the background draining the battery quickly over time. Instead, the task will be run on defined intervals of the alarm.

Great Tools To Improve Android Development

I’ve been developing Android apps for a few years now. During this time, I’ve had the opportunity to try a huge selection of software, some of which didn’t work as well as I’d hoped and some of which that exceeded my expectations.

Although these tools are my personal preference, I am confident they will change your Android development strategies and how you develop your apps.

Using An SSL Certificate With Apache

When you have a website that transmits information from a user to your server it is very important to encrypt it. The last thing you want is someones password being sniffed by a malicious user when they register or sign in. By using Secure Socket Layer (SSL), data is encrypted between client and server preventing any malicious users from sniffing your password in plain text.

The following will help you install an SSL certificate to one of your Apache web server virtual hosts.

Use The Android And iOS Camera With Ionic Framework

Most smart phones on the market have at least one camera if not two. You may want to leverage these cameras to make the next Instagram or SnapChat type application. Lucky for us, the native Android and iOS camera can be easily accessed using Ionic Framework and the AngularJS extension set, ngCordova.

The following will help you add camera functionality into your latest creation.

Securing Your Apache phpMyAdmin Installation

If you’re using a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, chances are you’re going to be using phpMyAdmin. By default, your phpMyAdmin installation is not very secure and chances are your MySQL database has a treasure trove of excellent information for a malicious user.

By following these steps, you can make it significantly tougher for your phpMyAdmin installation to be exploited.

Show Native Toast Notifications Using Ionic Framework

There are often times where you need to display messages to your users inside your Ionic Framework Android and iOS application. If you’ve been using Ionic for a while, you’re already familiar with the $ionicPopup feature, but what happens if you don’t want to bother the user with interaction?

Using the Toast plugin by Eddy Verbruggen for Apache Cordova, we are able to create native Toast notifications for both iOS and Android that require no user interaction to close.

Signing An Apache Cordova 4.x Android App For Release

Preparing an Apache Cordova Android project for release can seem like a difficult task. The documentation for completing such a task is definitely more than it needs to be.