The landscape of mobile development is shifting beneath our feet. For years, "Smart Apps" were simply thin clients for powerful cloud APIs. If you wanted to understand the sentiment of a sentence or find similar documents, you packaged a JSON request, sent it to a server, and waited for a response. But the era of the "Cloud-First" mandate is being challenged by a new priority: Privacy-Centric, Low
If you've spent any time doing Android development from the command line, you know the rhythm: adb devices, adb logcat, adb shell, repeat. It works, but it's friction — switching between windows, retyping device serials, manually grep-ing through logcat noise. padb is a Python-based terminal UI that wraps all of that into one interactive session. No GUI required, no Android Studio open in the back
Originally published on rohitraj.tech UPI fraud hit ₹805 cr in India last year. Cloud APIs leak data. So I built ScamRakshak — fully on-device scam detection. 3-tier inference engine: Gemma 4 LLM — context-aware classification LiteRT — fast pattern model Regex fallback — when battery low Full architecture write-up: https://rohitraj.tech/en/notes/build-on-device-ai-scam-detector-android-gemma Read
After getting frustrated with news apps designed to keep me scrolling forever, I built Trace - an Android app that aggregates news from 100+ sources and uses AI to create 30-second summaries. The app is free, no ads, no subscription. Just news that respects your time. The Problem Every morning I'd open Google News or Twitter and 30 minutes would vanish. Not because I was learning anything useful,
User types "android" into your search box. That's 7 API calls if you wired it the way I did the first time. A few months later I shipped a pagination bug where every infinite-scroll fetch flashed a full-screen loader for half a second. And then there was the Settings screen that needed to refresh the Dashboard when the user changed theme — but Settings couldn't import Dashboard without a circular
Building a Search Bar for Your Firefox New Tab Extension A search bar is the highest-ROI feature for any new tab extension. Users type queries dozens of times per day — if your extension can save them from navigating to google.com first, that's real value. Here's how I built the search bar in the Weather & Clock Dashboard extension. <form id="search-form" class="search-form" role="search"> <di
Testing Firefox Extensions with Playwright: End-to-End Testing Guide Extension testing is one of those things everyone knows they should do but few actually do. I've been using Playwright for end-to-end tests on the Weather & Clock Dashboard extension and it's changed how I think about extension quality. Unit tests don't cover the biggest failure modes: Does the extension actually load in Firefo
Keyboard Shortcuts in Firefox Extensions: A Complete Guide Keyboard shortcuts make extensions feel native. A new tab extension that users can control without clicking feels much more polished. Here's how to add them to your Firefox extension. { "manifest_version": 2, "commands": { "toggle-dark-mode": { "suggested_key": { "default": "Ctrl+Shift+D", "mac": "Command+Sh