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The crash-proof app doesn’t exist. It never has, and it probably never will. Because apps can crash for all kinds of reasons, some of them impossible to foresee. No matter how well we build them, crashes are going to happen to our apps. So, as devs, we need to know how to react to a crash when it happens. And in this context, understanding crash reports is crucial. They provide the clues we need to put the pieces together.

The Android emulator is an Android virtual device that is used to test and debug Android code. It looks and behaves the same as a physical Android device, and while it has some limitations (more of which later), it provides real time and cost savings for developers. Unlike the iPhone, which is limited to one manufacturer and a specific number of iOS versions, there are thousands of Android device types out there.

Imagine you’re a toolmaker. You’ve got an old-school toolshed with loads of ancient equipment: hammers, pickaxes, all the stuff people used hundreds of years ago. And then one day you walk into your toolshed to find laser cutters, 3D printers and loads of other digital tools at your disposal. Life would suddenly seem a lot simpler, right?

Last week, we got a question from one of our users asking us how to use Kotlin Apply. Specifically, the reader wanted to know whether it was best to use the apply function in their Android application, or another of the many Kotlin scope functions. So we got to thinking: Why not write an article about the whole topic of Kotlin scope functions? After all, they’re awesome: they let us write readable, concise code in Kotlin, and work with an object without the need for repeated references.