A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a way to maintain online anonymity by masking your public IP address so your online activity is untraceable. There are a ton of VPN services and apps available out there, most of which have paid plans, but in this post I am going to demonstrate how you can set up your own, for free. Let’s get started.

Create an account in AWS

We first need to have an account with AWS set up. So head over to this link to create your account.

Fill in all the required info, then proceed below.

Login to your Management Console

Once you sign in to your Management…

In this post, we shall continue adding features to the app we created in this post. In the mentioned post, we used Firebase ML Kit to recognize text from images taken from our camera. What we will do next is read the text displayed on the TextView out aloud by adding text-to-speech support.

Layout

Let’s start by adding a Seekbar and a button. The Seekbar handles the talking speed and the button triggers the text-to-speech functionality to read the text displayed out aloud. Right below the TextView with id txt_image add the following lines of code:

Adding text-to-speech functionality

Next, we need to…

The Backend-As-A-Service (BaaS) market is becoming increasingly popular for businesses that don’t have the funds to invest in backend infrastructure or maintain the costs of hiring backend engineers. These companies provide backend solutions to complex tasks that would otherwise take a developer a lot of time to implement by providing the underlying code solutions to tasks like user authentication, push notifications and integrating of realtime databases etc. Top of this market is Google owned Firebase.

Firebase gained traction ever since it was acquired by Google in 2014. It has a myriad of services and the list of the services it…

Firebase ML Kit is a mobile SDK for Android and iOS that enables developers to build apps using machine learning with ease. It has various capabilities including text recognition, image labelling, on-device translation among others. In this post, we are going to create a simple Android app that recognizes text from images we take with our camera. So let’s get started.

Create the project

First off, create a new Android project with an Empty Activity. We are going to use minimum SDK version 23 and our primary language will be Java.

Firebase is a Backend-As-A-Service — BaaS — owned by Google for application development that frees developers of the hassle of integrating several backend services among others, leaving developers to worry about creating great user interfaces. In this article, we are going to create a simple Android application that utilizes Firebase Cloud Storage to upload images from our gallery.

Create the project

Create a new Android Studio project and give it a name. I will be using Java for this project with minimum SDK version 23.

Design the layout

After that is complete we can now design our layout. We will be utilizing RecyclerView for our list…

Recently I’ve been experimenting with ViewPager2 which is an improved version of the earlier ViewPager library for Android. ViewPager2 is built on top of RecyclerView and supports vertical orientation as well as right-to-left enabled automatically. It allows us to create beautiful user interfaces when we swipe between lists for example. In this post, we will create swipeable vertical videos like the one used in Tiktok. Let’s get started!

Create a project and add dependencies

Create a new project with an Empty Activity and give it a name. We will add the Material Library dependency to the build.gradle file.

implementation 'com.google.android.material:material:1.1.0'

Change theme

Next, we will need to change…

Flutterwave is a new startup that aggregates payment services for more than 60 gateways from around the globe. The startup provides an easy and reliable payment solution for businesses worldwide. Started in 2016, they aim to make it easier for Africans to build global businesses that can make and accept any payment, anywhere from across Africa and around the world.

For this post we are going to create a simple Android application using Flutterwave’s Android SDK to demonstrate card payments as well as M-PESA payments. Flutterwave’s Android SDK really cuts short the amount of time a developer was to integrate…

Fingerprint authentication has further enhanced the security of our phones and apps. As introduced in Android Marshmallow 6.0, fingerprint authentication offers a quick and convenient way of authenticating a user’s identity. In this post we will be building a simple fingerprint authentication app from scratch.

Set up your project

Create a new Android project with an empty activity and name it FingerprintAuth, and set minimum Android version to Marshmallow 6.0.

Creating the layout

We are going to use a single activity that simply prompts the user to place their fingerprint on the scanner. Head over to your activity_main.xml and let’s design our layout. We are going to…