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…

Bottom navigation bar make it easy for users to explore and switch between top-level views in a single tap. It should be used when application has three to five top-level destinations. In this post, we are going to create a stylish bottom navigation bar in Java but using a Kotlin library.

Add dependencies

Create an empty project in Android Studio. We are going to use this Chip Navigation Bar library. Add the library’s dependencies to your build.gradle file:

We require the Kotlin dependency in order to use the library in our Java project.

Designing our menu

We need to design our menu which will…

Last year, I did a blog post on PayPal integration on Android and I thought I would reciprocate the same for web. In that post, I explained the necessary requirements of creating a PayPal sandbox account before we get into coding. If you haven’t checked it out kindly do so before we get started. But for reference, click here to create a sandbox account. When creating a sandbox account, put any amount of money you want as the initial balance. Afterwards, click on Create App. You can retrieve your ClientID and ClientSecret when you create the app.

Prerequisites

Ensure the following…