Sunday, November 1, 2015

Grocery Reminder - An Open-Source Android App

I'd like to announce that my first Android app, the Grocery Reminder, has been made Open Source, and released under the MIT License.  You can find the source on my Github account.

Why Open-Source?

Some of you are probably asking why I decided to make my first app Open-Source.  After all, I put significant time and effort into this project.  The truth of the matter is that I created the app as part of a contest with my current employer in order to learn more about Android development.  In terms of how useful the app has been, let's just say it let me scratch an itch and my wife uses it on a regular basis, which is good enough for me.  

Beyond that I learned quite a bit about Android over the six months or so that it took me to develop it, and I've been able to leverage what I've learned in order to write a series of posts on Android and Test-Driven Development.  I did this to show that TDD and Android were not water and oil, and that it is more than possible to write test-driven mobile apps.  I'll continue to use this code for examples for the remainder of the Android TDD series, which I hope will benefit Android developers in one way or another.

Releasing this app as Open-Source software is an extension of the goals I mentioned above; I'm putting this code out there in the hopes that others will learn from it.  Whether that is learning a better way of developing and test-driving Android apps or simply learning from my mistakes is up to each developer to decide. 

So there it is.  The code is out there and I encourage you to check it out, hack on it, maybe even issue a pull request or two.  I look forward to any feedback you might have, and happy hacking!

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