Android Dev Tools - Become a Master with these Tools, Collaborate Better

You'll be well on your way to developing Android apps like a pro.

That’s why I’ve compiled this big list of Android development tools so you can find all you might need in one place.

Accessibility Scanner is an Android app that scans through your apps UI and makes accessibility recommendations based on the content of your screen. It lets you know what your app is missing in terms of content descriptions if your colours don’t contrast well enough or the tap targets are too small. It is a great tool for improving the accessibility of your app.

Window VQA (Visual Quality Assurance) is an app for measuring views on screen. It provides a useful overlay on top of your app which allows you to click on the views and get the measurements of them in px or dp.

Vysor is an extension for the Google Chrome browser that connects to an app on your smartphone, enabling you to control your phone from your PC or Mac using the mouse/trackpad and keyboard. Everything happens via a USB cable, which you'll need to connect the phone to your computer's USB port.

Chucker simplifies the inspection of HTTP(S) requests/responses fired by your Android App. Chucker works as an OkHttp Interceptor persisting all those events inside your application and providing a UI for inspecting and sharing their content.

Apps using Chucker will display a push notification showing a summary of ongoing HTTP activity. Tapping on the notification launches the full Chucker UI. Apps can optionally suppress the notification, and launch the Chucker UI directly from within their own interface.

Stetho is a tool that connects to Chrome Developer Tools and gives access to a bunch of app information as if it were a webpage you were debugging. You can get access to on-device databases, update SharedPreferences and monitor network requests and responses.

LeakCanary helps you pick up any memory leaks that you may have in your applications. It does some pretty complex magic to analyse heaps and helps narrow down the cause of your memory leaks.

ShapeShifter is my favourite tool for creating AnimatedVectorDrawable animations. It takes the guesswork away from creating cute animations, helps fix paths and generate all the required XML for creating an AVD. If you want to see a quick overview of how to use it, check out my talk on animations here.

Charles Proxy is a tool for network debugging. It allows you to intercept network requests and change the response or requests. Charles Proxy is a great tool for testing error conditions or just recording what your app is doing.

Say no more, every Android Developer needs a screen recording app. This one is my favourite because there are no ads and it is super easy to use.

DevTiles is an app that allows you to easily access some developer options right from your devices shortcuts/tiles. Options include a tile for showing touches, enabling/disabling demo mode, toggling animator durations etc.

NimbleDroid is a testing platform that allows you to check your finished Android app for memory leaks, bugs, and other issues prior to publishing on Google Play. Using NimbleDroid helps to free up app developers’ time and speed up the overall QA process, helping to get the app to market faster.

Companies such as Mozilla, Yahoo, and Pinterest have all used NimbleDroid to test their applications. Personalized pricing is available based on customers’ specific needs and the number of users.

ML Kit is an Android developer tool that allows you to add machine learning functionality to your app from Google. That means adding things like computer vision and OCR without needing a giant budget and heaps of big data. Start with this simple tutorial.

AinD launches Android apps in Docker by nesting Anbox containers inside Docker.

Unlike VM-based similar projects, AinD can be executed on IaaS instances without support for nested virtualisation.

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