Unconnectify-Re

This is an attempt to rewrite the Unconnectify android App using newer APIs, especially the WorkManager.

The Unconnectify app allows setting alarms for disabling and re-enabling connections (Wifi, Bluetooth and Hotspot), while offering some flexibility as to the time, the date and the frequency of these alarms.

Libraries used in this project

• CardView
• RecyclerView
• Material Design
• ViewModel
• LivaData
• ConstraintLayout
• Room
• WorkManager
• Koin (Light-weight dependency injection library)
• Barista (UI testing library)

Key improvements

• For job scheduling, this project uses WorkManager compared to the previously used Evernote Android job. WorkManager chooses the appropriate way and best option to schedule background tasks depending on the device API level, included dependencies and the app's state. (Checkout this link for a comparison of the other available options for job scheduling)
• For data persistence, this project uses Room compared to the previously used low-level SQLite. Room guarantees compile-time verification of the SQL queries and eliminates the need to write boilerplate code for converting between SQL queries and data objects.
• This project stands on a better architecture: the alarms list screen was built using the repository pattern, ViewModel was used to handle UI related data in a lifecycle-aware manner, LiveData to post data changes to its decoupled observers and dependency injection is used with the help of Koin.
• This project contains both unit and UI tests for many of its components.
• This project uses ConstrainLayout in order to flatten and simplifiy the -XML- layouts.

Missing features

• Notifications weren't implemented in this project (which would be a great opportunity to work with the latest Notifications API features)
• Hotspot handling is not implemented due to changes made in Android Oreo regarding controlling a device's Hotspot.

Challenges

• APIs for controlling conectivity features on Android devices are pretty restricted, and can varry depending on the Android api level. Controlling cellular data is not possible on non-rooted devices for example, and as mentioned above, hotspot handling changed in Android Oreo.
• With WorkManager, it isn't possible to create a PeriodicWorkRequest with an initial delay (For example, scheduling a job X that would start after 2 hours and repeat every week). A workaround I used to solve this is to use a OneTimeWorkRequest with the initial delay that then schedules the PeriodicWorkRequest (With the previous example, this means to schedule a job Y that is triggered after 2 hours that then schedules job X to be repeated every week).

Demo