hello, Kai!

Hello there

how can I help you today?

I have no question right now

ah, OK

if you come up with a question, ask away!

Sure :)

:D

Hi :)

hello, sudokai!

Hi

sudokai: how can I help you today?

Hi Mark, do you know how often do Android phones check for app updates?

I swear I saw it's every 12h, but I can't find the source

I have no idea, sorry

and it would not surprise me if it varies by manufacturer

I'm referring to Google Play Store updates

oh, wait, sorry, I misread your question

I don't know much about the mechanics of that

it's entirely possible that it is more of a push, rather than a poll

Google knows what apps you have installed, after all

When I was looking into Play Store staged rollouts, I swear I saw this 12h interval somewhere, but I can't find it.

so, they could use the same engine that powers Firebase Cloud Messaging to tell the device that an update is available

my clients handle their own Play Store distribution, and I haven't shipped something of my own on the Play Store in years

so I don't have much hands-on experience with that aspect of the overall process -- sorry!

It's alright, thanks anyway!

if either of you come up with a question, go right ahead!

Not a question, but I had a lot of trouble subscribing to your Jetpack Compose newsletter

what sort of trouble?

I know of at least one person who was having difficulty getting getrevue.co to load

Toubles with the iframe

meaning that the content would not load in the iframe?

So I went to https://jetc.dev/ and when I entered my email and clicked submit, the iframe gave some sort of security error

"Refused to display 'https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jetc' in a frame because it set 'X-Frame-Options' to 'sameorigin'."

Oh wow, the url is being stripped by the chat

they must have changed their site settings and don't support iframe

crap

Between the single quotes in the error above, it's 'https www.getrevue.co/profile/jetc'

yeah, I can reproduce it here

this used to work

I'll work on coming up with some other solution tomorrow

thanks for mentioning it!

I do have another question, now I remember it!

Do you recommend using ConstraintLayout everywhere or is there some situation where another layout would be more performant?

for trivial stuff (e.g., where you just need a background and some padding), I'd use FrameLayout

I tend to use ConstraintLayout for pretty much everything else

I do not know if any scenarios where ConstraintLayout is slower than, say, a bunch of nested LinearLayouts

(sorry, that should have been "know of any scenarios")

I mean, common sense makes me think that ConstraintLayouts may not be that performant as they claim it to be. It has to perform many calculations.

you'

you're assuming the others don't, though

a bunch of nested LinearLayouts will require many calculations as well, just spread over N containers

Yeah, but as you said, nesting ConstraintLayouts might be bad right?

I'd avoid it unless you have a concrete need for it

if your design requires it, then you don't really have a lot of choice

and that's not strictly a ConstraintLayout-holding-ConstraintLayout problem

So you would only use the ConstraintLayout for the outer container

?

I'd use what I need to use :-)

:)

the only reason I can think of off the top of my head to need to nest a container in a ConstraintLayout is because the container itself has visible properties, such as a background

if the nested container itself has no such properties, you should be able to avoid nesting containers, relying just on ConstraintLayout rules plus virtual helpers (e.g., Barrier)

if the nested container does have visible properties, and it only needs one child, use a FrameLayout as the nested container

Well, I have a small component that's a custom view

That uses ConstraintLayout

presumably, it has more than one child view

Then this custom view is inserted dozens of times in a fragment

That uses ConstraintLayout

dozens?

do you have screen space for dozens?

that's not strictly a problem

after all, we use ConstraintLayout for rows in a RecyclerView all the time

Well, dozens in plural might be an overstatement, but 1 dozen yes

Okay thanks

and usually performance, from a layout standpoint, is only an issue in scrolling

so, items in a RecyclerView need to render cheaply, so when the user scrolls the list/grid/whatever, it scrolls smooothly

Coming from the web world, I find the Android tooling for this stuff lacking tbh

what is "this stuff", specifically?

This UI stuff

um, that wasn't very specific :-)

I mean, for a website, scrolling is not a problem unless you do something horribly wrong

sure it is

you paid the price when you loaded the page, though, more than likely

You don't need to do this fancy recycling stuff unless you need to be Google Photos

Btw, on the topic of UI, do you know of any good resources on building custom UI components for Android? Could be a link, articles, books, etc.? Anything.

there's a chapter on it in *The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development*

I don't have any links handy for anything else

on the whole, creating custom views isn't that common

Thanks. It's because I think I have a big knowledge gap to cover.

it's a bit old, and isn't as in-depth as it could be, but it's all I have

I'm able to put premade stuff together, like Material Components

and that's what the vast majority of developers do

roughly speaking, there are two main scenarios for doing something other than that:

But then I go to Play Store and I see apps with beautiful, custom UI

1. you want to reuse the custom view across multiple projects, including things like releasing it as open source, which is all fine

2. you are trying to make domain-specific custom views (e.g., a RestaurantView), which isn't really how Android development usually works

"beautiful, custom UI" does not necessarily mean custom views, though it could

Okay, thanks I'll read your chapter

a lot can be accomplished with the stock views, coupled with styles, themes, drawables, etc.

Maybe it's my lack of experience, but I find web styling much more straightforward

Just throw some CSS on top of your HTML

You can do anything easily

Android styles and themes have a lot in common with CSS, but they were not well-documented in the early years

even today, it's lacking

anyway, that's a wrap for today's chat

the next chat is Tuesday at 7:30pm US Eastern

Thank you!

have a pleasant day, and stay healthy!

You too!