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Month: August 2018

Who Will Be King? targetSdkVersion API 26 update

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While this app was meant to be updated last because of its placement in the alphabet I jumped to this one because Google pulled it from the Play store. This was because this app is aimed at kids and it didn’t have a privacy policy. Anyway, I quickly whipped up this fantastic privacy policy and added that to the meta information on the Play store. So, while I was at it, I recompiled this using the Oreo SDK libraries.

The app is now up on Google Play and this site. It is currently pending on Amazon.

Australian Daily Prayer targetSdkVersion API 26 update

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Continuing on the Play store push to update all new apps to Oreo (Android 8.0), I have updated the Australian Daily Prayer app to conform to this new standard. There could be some minor improvements that come with the updated libraries, it may be hard to notice.

On the web side of things for this app, I have tweaked it a little bit, mainly dealing with the new ESV API. This tweak also affected passage headings in the app, which this new version should fix up.

Also, hopefully, I have improved the error message about the API reaching its limit due to too many requests per day. I honestly didn’t think this app was that popular to reach the daily limit. I think sometimes some web crawler hits the site causing a bit of request in a short period of time. Also, some amateur hackers try to hit the site trying to do an SQL injection using queries that have things like “1=1”, “1=2” or “AnD BenchMark” in them. (This won’t actually do anything because the website doesn’t run an SQL database, the site’s data comes from csv and xml files, some of which you can download and see from the site easily enough.) But these attempts also make queries to the ESV API, again bumping up the requests per day. Ideally, I will mitigate these queries, maybe in the future…

The new Australian Daily Prayer app is live on the Google Play store, this site and on the Amazon Appstore.

321 targetSdkVersion API 26 update

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Google Play has said they want all their apps now to be at their SDK API version 26, or Android 8.0 or Oreo. I thought I might slowly re-roll my apps to conform to this standard, starting in alphabetical order.

To update to the newer version I had to update the permission requesting, so now users are prompted at the start if they want this app to save movies to their file system. Also, a bunch of libraries have been updated, so possibly it might be quicker or more secure.

While I was updating 321 I also came across a bug that meant you could keep on clicking the download image to download your video you may not have, and every time you clicked it would queue that download again, meaning that if you click multiple times when your download was running, you could end up with the same file multiple times in your “movies” directory. I have fixed that.

I would like to also give this app a more visual overhaul, but that will require more time.

This update is now live on the Play Store and on this website. Amazon sent me an email saying they have improved their app submission process, but because of a simple click on their system, this app is now locked for review and I can’t update it till 7:30 pm tonight – even though I hadn’t even uploaded the new APK… So I might give that a pass for now…