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Android
17 posts about Android. Every summary links to the original.
Grab ·
Scaling developer experience: How we improved Android Studio in a large monorepo
Grab's passenger Android monorepo contains roughly 2,000 modules and 11 million lines of code, leading to IDE sync times exceeding 35 minutes on cold starts. While Bazel handles application builds, Android Studio relies on Gradle sync to construct its project model, requiring Gradle to evaluate every module during configuration. To solve this bottleneck, the team built a custom Focus plugin that restricts IDE syncing to target modules and their direct dependencies. The architecture reuses a static dependency graph generated during existing Gradle-to-Bazel migration tasks to eliminate the Gradle configuration phase during module selection. An IntelliJ extension and a Groovy method-shadowing technique in settings.gradle allow developers to configure focused modules directly through a graphical user interface.
Rifqi FahmiSlack ·
How Slack Rebuilt Notifications 📣
Slack redesigned its legacy notification architecture to address user confusion, conflicting desktop and mobile preference systems, and tight coupling between notification content and push delivery. The engineering team unified four separate preference models into a single framework with three channel options: All new posts, Mentions, and Mute. To ensure safe rollback and backwards compatibility without direct database mutations, Slack implemented a read-time translation strategy alongside a new desktop_push_enabled preference and auto-saving cross-platform React UI components. This decoupling of activity from push delivery resulted in a fivefold sustained increase in settings engagement, reduced reliance on per-channel overrides, and eliminated synchronization mismatches across mobile and desktop clients.
Frances CoronelGrab ·
Enabling R8 optimization at scale with AI-assisted debugging
Grab experienced widespread Application Not Responding spikes across its Android superapp, driven by memory pressure and complex Jetpack Compose layouts embedded in legacy code. While switching to advanced R8 optimization promised significant performance gains, obfuscated stack traces and two-hour remote compilation cycles stalled investigation across nine million lines of code. To resolve this, engineers built Model Context Protocol tools to automate APK decompilation, deobfuscation, and code context extraction. The team paired these tools with an AI workflow that used the GitLab CLI to generate multiple solution branches and run verification builds in parallel. This strategy replaced hours of manual reverse engineering with minutes of automated analysis, allowing the team to debug and validate aggressive optimizations at scale.
Nguyen Van MinhGrab ·
Reclaiming Terabytes: Optimizing Android image caching with TLRU
The Grab Android application relies heavily on dynamically downloaded images managed through Glide's disk cache, which originally enforced a 100 MB limit without evaluating content age. While the 90th percentile of users consistently hit this maximum capacity, users below the threshold retained stale promotional and feature assets indefinitely. To reclaim storage while protecting user experience, engineers extended Glide's existing DiskLruCache implementation into a Time-Aware Least Recently Used (TLRU) cache. The TLRU design pairs standard maximum size limits with Time-To-Live eviction based on last-accessed timestamps, alongside a minimum size safety threshold that preserves essential files for returning users. This hybrid approach enables proactive eviction of outdated content without causing empty-cache performance penalties or increasing backend requests.
Nguyen Van MinhGrab ·
Demystifying user journeys: Revolutionizing troubleshooting with auto tracking
Tracking user journeys across hundreds of mobile UI components via manual clickstream instrumentation frequently caused data gaps and prolonged issue resolution. Grab designed AutoTrack, an SDK that automatically records application lifecycle states, launch triggers, user interactions, and screen contexts. The system monitors transitions across foreground, background, and inactive states alongside entry points like deep links and push notifications. On the client side, AutoTrack captures complete screen hierarchy metadata from native Android activities, fragments, and iOS view controllers, redacting sensitive data to comply with privacy regulations. This automated trace enables engineering teams to reproduce elusive bugs, route incidents to domain owners, and generate automated UI test cases from real-world usage patterns.
Alex ProkofievGrab ·
Bringing Grab’s Live Activity to Android: Enhancing user experience through custom notifications
Grab designed an equivalent to iOS Live Activities for Android to provide real-time order tracking outside the app. Because Android lacks Apple's native ActivityKit push token system, the team substituted push tokens with placeholder values to maintain technical consistency across platforms and preserve backend push targeting via their Hedwig service. For the user interface, engineering selected custom notifications over floating views because custom notifications avoid intrusive screen usage and do not require the 'Draw over other apps' permission. The client implementation separates responsibilities across dedicated classes: LiveActivityIntegrationManager handles token registration across business verticals, LiveActivityAttributes encapsulates UI configuration, and LiveActivityManager maps payloads to Android NotificationManager instances. The solution launched for Food, Mart, Express, and Transport verticals.
Jessica SeanGrab ·
Android App Size at Scale with Project Bonsai
Grab launched Project Bonsai to optimize the size of its Android superapp, which encompassed over four million lines of code across 1,500 modules. Because large app sizes negatively impact user acquisition on low-end devices with constrained bandwidth, the engineering team structured its optimization strategy around measurement, reduction, and containment. The team developed App Sizer, a custom CI-integrated tool that tracks binary compositions and module size contributions in Grafana. Initial reductions targeted Java and Kotlin dex files, resolving bloated transitive R classes by upgrading the Android Gradle Plugin to eliminate overly broad R8 retention rules. These initiatives achieved a 26% reduction in app download size while simultaneously decreasing overall disk footprint.
Nguyen Van MinhGrab ·
How telematics helps Grab to improve safety
Grab developed an in-house telematics engine to monitor driver-partner habits, detect crashes, and improve ride safety beyond passenger feedback. The mobile telematics SDK collects accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS readings, running on-device processing for immediate accident detection while batching ride data for post-trip safety reports. Because triaxial sensor sampling rates vary independently across diverse devices, the SDK synchronizes data through interpolation to a uniform time grid followed by decimation to an output data rate. Telematics signals are transformed to the frequency domain using Fourier Transform for local compression before backend upload. Grab also combines telemetry with spatial data to identify dangerous road zones and plans to expand on-device event detection across all platform verticals.
Wilson BurhanGrab ·
Reflecting on the Five Years of Bug Bounty at Grab
Grab launched a private bug bounty programme on HackerOne before opening it publicly in 2017 to complement internal product security efforts. Prior to going public, the team conducted security sweeps, established policies, and expanded the testing scope to prepare for an influx of reports. Operationally, the team opted to pay full bounties immediately upon report triage rather than waiting for vulnerability resolution to incentivize security researchers. Noise reduction was handled using HackerOne Triage, Human-Augmented Signal, and by blocking automated scanning networks targeting Grab's infrastructure. In addition, rotating security engineers weekly and integrating HackerOne APIs with PagerDuty ensured fast initial response times.
Ajay SrivastavaGrab ·
How Grab is Blazing Through the Superapp Bazel Migration
Grab's mobile superapp scaled past 2.5 million lines of code across both Android and iOS, leading to unsustainable local and CI build times under Gradle and Xcode. To address these bottlenecks, the engineering team analyzed their dependency trees and introduced an internal tool to calculate and optimize the build critical path. They also deployed a Kubernetes-autoscaled remote build system using Mainframer for Android and implemented Test Impact Analysis to run only affected tests in pre-merge validation. While dependency decoupling yielded modest 7% to 10% gains and iOS remote builds proved unscalable on Apple hardware, Android remote builds reduced local compile times by up to 50%, and targeted test execution reduced pre-merge pipeline durations by more than 30%.
Sergii GrechukhaGrab ·
Keeping 170 Libraries Up to Date on a Large Scale Android App
Grab's passenger Android superapp relies on more than 170 in-house and open-source libraries, incorporating five to ten library bumps into each weekly release. Although developers often avoided updates due to the fear of leaking defects or crashes into production, the engineering team established a risk-assessment framework based on codebase usage and the volume of incoming changes. To minimize update diffs and avoid accumulating large issues, libraries are updated incrementally on a weekly cadence matching upstream release schedules. Automated UI test cases written in Gherkin syntax execute on CI for every merge request, while high-risk bumps trigger targeted QA manual testing. This structured updating process prevents defect leakage while keeping the application compliant with evolving Google Play target API requirements.
Lucas NelaupeGrab ·
Returning 575 Terabytes of Storage Space to Our Users
Android Vitals data revealed that 15.7% of Grab users had less than 1GB of free device storage and uninstalled the app at 1.2 times the normal rate. To understand on-device storage consumption, the team instrumented session launches using the Android StorageManager API to collect binary size, cache folder size, and total footprint metrics. Analysis showed unusually large cache sizes driven by orphaned cache folders from discontinued third-party libraries, including an image library replacement of Picasso by Glide. An automated cleanup routine deployed in app updates purged legacy cache directories upon launch. This mechanism reclaimed 575 terabytes of junk data across more than 13 million devices, averaging 40MB per user.
Lucas NelaupeGrab ·
Grab-Posisi - Southeast Asia’s First Comprehensive GPS Trajectory Dataset
Grab released Grab-Posisi, a GPS trajectory dataset covering Singapore and Jakarta designed to overcome the poor coverage, low sampling rates, and missing contextual metadata common in existing public datasets. Captured in April 2019 from drivers in transit, the dataset comprises 84,000 trajectories, over 80 million GPS pings, and more than 1 million kilometres recorded at a one-second sampling frequency. Each entry in the 2 GB Apache Parquet dataset records geographic coordinates, timestamp, accuracy radius, bearing, speed, mobile operating system, and vehicle mode. To protect privacy, driver personal information is encrypted and trip start and end locations are removed. The data enables applications including automated road network reconstruction, map matching, real-time traffic forecasting, and municipal infrastructure planning.
Zhengmin XuGrab ·
Journey to a Faster Everyday Superapp Where Every Millisecond Counts
Grab undertook an initiative to reduce startup time and improve time to interactive (TTI) on its passenger mobile app. Because local benchmarks failed to simulate real device and network conditions, the team instrumented code in production across 8–9 million daily users to capture p50 and p95 metrics. Initial gains came from caching service tiles between sessions and removing a startup animation, saving four seconds. Architectural changes followed, including converting iOS dynamic frameworks to static linking and merging others, while Android initialisation was refactored with Kotlin coroutines. Replacing a heavy third-party analytics library with an internal experimentation platform yielded further startup reductions.
Renu YadavGrab ·
Driving Southeast Asia Forward Through People-Focused Design
Designing digital products for Southeast Asia requires tailoring user experiences to unique regional constraints and consumer behaviors across diverse populations. Users in the region often operate low-end mobile hardware on congested networks while carefully rationing prepaid mobile data. Grab addresses these challenges by designing comprehensively for non-ideal UI stacks, implementing loading skeletons, and replacing heavy video tutorials with lightweight SVG animations to minimize bandwidth consumption. Furthermore, product teams adapt to mobile-only environments by prioritizing phone number and one-time-password registrations while avoiding legacy desktop-era iconography. Visual accessibility is validated by testing UI readability on dimmed, low-resolution screens under bright ambient sunlight.
Philip MadeleyGrab ·
React Native in GrabPay
Following the release of the GrabPay Merchant App, Grab adopted React Native inside the Grab Passenger app to maintain a single cross-platform codebase across iOS and Android. Integrating the framework into native applications required establishing bridge communication guidelines and incorporating React Native modules into the Grablet architecture. To streamline network communication, API calls were migrated from axios to native bridges returning promises, which eliminated the need to pass access tokens into JavaScript. The team also established a shared internal library of approximately 20 UI components alongside Redux for state management and react-navigation for routing. Modules like BillPay and Transaction History successfully launched across Southeast Asia while maintaining the performance and feel of native software.
Sushant TiwariGrab ·
Grab Vietnam Careers Week
Grab announced its first Grab Vietnam Careers Week, held in Ho Chi Minh City from 22 to 26 October 2016, aimed at hiring engineers to improve regional transportation and reduce congestion. At the time, Grab operated on 23 million mobile devices supported by 460,000 drivers across Southeast Asia. The announcement features an interview with Singapore-based iOS engineer Hai Pham and Android engineer Son Nguyen discussing team culture, regular hackathons termed "Grabathons", and relocation to Singapore. Technical candidates undergo a Codility test and are evaluated on clean mobile architecture, testing, and performance maintenance. The engineers also offer advice on apartment hunting through online community forums and adapting to life in Singapore.
Grab Engineering