The Tech Compass: Navigating AI's Waves, Securing Our Foundations, and Optimizing Every Byte Welcome to your latest dose of cutting-edge insights! As we hurtle further into 2026, the technology landscape continues its breathtaking transformation. This week's trending talks offer a fascinating snapshot of where we are and where we're headed. From the pervasive, sometimes perilous, influence of Ar
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
It's a one-line item on the roadmap. "Send a push notification when X happens." Estimate is two days, three if the backend doesn't have FCM credentials yet. There's a library for it. The library is the visible part. The other 90% is platform lifecycle, registration state machines, race conditions with navigation, payload archaeology, and a half-dozen iOS and Android quirks. Nobody writes them down
Chips, Curricula, and Code Share the Steering Wheel Silicon bends toward biology as reasoning becomes the new benchmark, and classrooms race to keep pace. Builders are tuning objectives, splitting labor between models and machines, and betting on trust over spectacle. What happened: AI is pairing with organ-on-chip systems to read and guide tissue-level signals on silicon. The combination aims