Bootcamp Highlights - Android part 3

Guest blog by Kimberley HaywawrdOn Tuesday we were joined by Kate and Kai for the last of three Android related workshops. In this workshop we covered Firebase, what it is, and what it can do, and then spent some time looking at architecture and databases access.To start off we looked at the analytic related features Firebase comes with. You can use Firebase to view information such as the number of active users of your app, how long those users have been active for, what pages they visit when active, as well as where traffic to your app comes from. Firebase also has Crashlytics which reports information relating to the state of your app. Using Crashlytics you can find out if, and when, your app crashed for users, and then use stack trace to find out what happened leading up to said crash, helping you to find what caused it. You can also force your app to crash and then see how well it handles this and recovers!The last part of Firebase we covered was messaging, with Firebase allowing for the potential to set up cloud messaging features that can be used by users to communicate with each other. We also looked into Room, and how you can use DataManagers to access information stored in a database. To finish up we then briefly covered ViewModel architecture and how it can be used to separate out different aspects of code and help make it more understandable. If you missed out on these events, or want to review what was covered, some of the slides used can be found at https://www.slideshare.net/AgentK/android-101-building-a-simple-app-with-kotlin-in-90-minutes