Droidcon NYC 2015

The Android app ecosystem is an international phenomenon. Developers need better tools now, more than ever, and the number of third-party SDKs is also growing to meet the developer's needs. Unfortunately, many of these SDKs are poorly developed and extremely difficult to use. In fact, at Twitter on the Fabric team, we've detected a significant percentage of issues caused by third-party SDKs.

Fabric, formerly Crashlytics, is well-known for its focus on SDK quality, and has been deployed on billions of devices. In this session, attendees will learn the skills to develop and distribute SDKs for Android. We’ll cover an overview of Fabric, deep dive into technical decisions we made, and present the learnings on developing an SDK for stability, testability, performance, overall footprint size, and, most importantly, exceptional ease of implementation. Over the course of the session, we'll develop a simple but well-architected SDK and uncover and explain many of the challenges we encountered when building SDKs at Twitter. Topics include device feature detection, supporting multiple application types (from Widgets to Services to Foreground GUI applications), API design, deploying artifacts, and coding patterns to support developer customization. We'll conclude with advanced topics, from less-known but very useful tricks to minimizing impact on application start-up time to reducing memory footprint and persistent CPU use.