20 Useful Tools For Android Programming

This article constitutes some of the best and most useful Android programming tools available today.

From debugging to quality enhancement tools, you’ll get a lot of resources that can help you save time and add to your productivity. Read on to know more about each of these tools.

1. Stetho

Stetho is a powerful open-source debugging platform for Android applications developed by Facebook. The tool makes it really easy to debug native Android applications and helps you perform various actions, such as viewing the full View hierarchy, checking the SQLite database, tracking network activity, and more.

Features:

• Allows you to use the Google Chrome debugging tool for various actions.
• Provides hierarchy inspection during debugging.
• Helps you to manage your network, databases, and other interacting features.
• Uses an HTTP web socket to send data.

2. LeakCanary

It is a powerful memory leak detection tool developed by Square. Once installed, it will automatically start, sending you notifications of every memory leak in your application with full-stack tracking.

Features:

• Fully automated memory leak checking for Android Activity components.
• Can configure parameters like the number of dump files and leak trackers, custom exclusions, and custom processing of analysis results, etc.
• Easy to integrate into your project.
• User-friendly interface and notification display.

3. Takt

A small library that can be used to check the FPS of an application while debugging it. It is always better to catch bugs and significant delays during the development phase than to let your users have a bad experience with an application already in production.

Features:

• Easily measure FPS for apps
• Quickly implement in existing code
• Easy-to-use

4. NimbleDroid

NimbleDroid is another tool to test your app for memory leaks and critical issues before publishing it to the Play Market. It works pretty well and automatically checks various user scenarios in your application, finding potential crashes and critical issues that need immediate attention.

Features:

• Analyze the performance of your application.
• Get slow and crash warnings.
• Auto-open user streams.
• Track method count.

5. ClassyShark

Using ClassyShark, you can browse any Android APK file and find the required information in it, such as classes, resources, manifest, dependencies, number of dex methods, and more. The tool will give you an idea of what other applications are doing and how.

Features:

• You can open and decompile dex, apk, jar, arr. files.
• It is easy to view the file information.
• Offers support for systematic code search.

6. Android Device Monitor

Android Device Monitor allows you to monitor your physical or virtual device while it is running, giving you information about how many processes are running per thread, network statistics, and LogCat, etc. All these features make it a pretty handy tool for testing the performance of your application.

7. B4A

B4A (Basic for Android) is an Android development tool from Anywhere Software, based on the Rapid Application Development (RAD) concept. B4A is an IDE and interpreter that allows developers to create applications using the BASIC programming language.

Features:

• Multifunctionality.
• IntelliSense editor.
• An array of libraries.
• GUI designer.
• User-friendly language.

8. Booster

Booster is a useful tool with an extensive set of quality enhancement tools developed specifically for mobile applications. This tool focuses on quality issues associated with increasing application complexity, such as performance, stability, and package size issues.

Features:

• System bug fixes.
• Easier to detect performance problems.
• Package size-reduction.
• Performance optimization.

9. InstaBug

Instabug allows the app users to share screenshots, video and audio recordings, and detailed logs, etc. of any bugs or issues that they find while using the app. It helps the developers to find errors that they may have overlooked and get solid insights from the users’ point of view.

Features:

• You can generate test reports and feedback.
• Bug and error detection is good and developer-friendly.
• Easy to integrate.
• Sends timely alerts.
• Crash solutions.

10. Android Tool for Mac

If you are an Android developer using a Mac, this little tool can help you get error reports as well as screenshots and videos of the application you are debugging.

Features:

• Install APKs without the Play Store.
• ecord video with outputs both in MP4 or animated GIF.
• Take screenshots of one or all of the devices connected to your Mac.
• Add your bash scripts to the scripts folder and run them on the same device.

11. DryRun

An innovative tool that allows you to test any Android library on the web in just a few seconds making it incredibly easy to try different libraries.

Features:

• After testing the library, there is no need to clean up.
• You can also test private repositories.
• There is no need to wait for Android Studio to load.

12. Spotbugs

When developing large applications, it is quite inevitable to have bugs in the app. However, you can avoid it by using this tiny plugin to help you find common Java bugs.

Features:

• Allows you to analyze code without executing.
• Helps in eliminating common bugs lying in code, saving you much time.
• Improves the quality of your code.

13. APK DeGuard

It is one of the best and probably the most useful tools for converting code into something more understandable for analysis for Android applications. It uses machine learning to analyze various applications and always gives the best possible result.

Features:

• Allows you to recover important information in Android APKs, including method and class names, as well as third-party libraries.
• Can detect string decoders and classes that handle sensitive data in Android malware.

14. Codota

We often run into obstacles while developing something new, so we check out some quick code examples on Stack Overflow or GitHub. Codota enables you to do this without leaving your IDE, saving you much time.

Features:

• Analyzes snippets of code on web pages and helps you read, understand, and save your code.
• Shows API documents for code and XML elements.
• Warns about deprecated APIs.
• Gives you great code examples right in the IDE.

15. JRebel for Android

This amazing tool from JRebel helps speed up the build and development of Android applications and allows for near real-time debugging.

Features:

• There is no redeployment of the application, which saves time.
• JRebel can load resources directly from the workspace, which eliminates the need to build a complete application archive (JAR / WAR / EAR).
• No new classloaders are created, so there is less risk of memory leaks during updates.

16. Android Asset Studio

It is a set of easy-to-use tools for creating different types of icons (launcher, notifications, general, and app shortcuts). You need these icons when developing Android apps.

Features:

• Android Studio gives you the ability to show a demo of your XML design.
• Due to a large number of hotkeys, coding is speeding up, and the time it takes to build an Android app is reduced.
• Each new update brings you the best functions and methods that can reduce your coding time.

17. Android Debug Database

This tool completely changes the way you debug databases and general settings in an Android application. Now you can view all data, edit or delete it and run SQL queries in the beautiful user interface.

Features:

• Running any SQL query against the given database to update and delete your data.
• Direct editing of database values.
• Data sorting.
• Debug Room InMemory database.

18. Drawable Optimizer

An Android app uses many different images, which tend to have a significant impact on the size of the APK. Therefore, you will need this excellent graphics plugin to help you optimize your images and reduce the final APK size.

Features:

• Offers two different ways to compress image files.
• Convenient and very easy to use for optimizing image files.
• Allows you to configure several parameters such as compression level, compression iterations number, compressor to use (zopfli or pngtastic), etc.

19. ADB IDEA

This plugin for Android Studio will help you speed up your day-to-day Android development dramatically. You can easily launch, restart, clear data, and uninstall your applications right from the IDE, saving a lot of time.

Features:

• Convenient for checking the functionality of an application in different states.
• Allows you to clear the data and see the result quickly.

20. Shake

Shake is one of the best tools for detecting errors, examining user actions to reproduce an error, and collecting screenshots or videos of the errors. It is a great tool to deal with bugs in an app’s beta testing.

Features:

• Bug tracking.
• Alerts/ escalation.
• Issue management.
• Access controls/ permissions.
• Bug/ issue capture.