Leaving Google Fi

I’m sharing the story of a bad situation I had ordering a new phone through Google Fi. It turned into a two month long ordeal where the service got worse and worse. At every turn the Google Fi team was presented with a chance to make things better and every time they blew it. I’m sharing this because I hope a long form review of the process is helpful to other potential Google Fi customers.

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Spoon and test apk WRITE_STORAGE_PERMISSION

I want to get this out quick without a lot of polish because something is better than nothing.

We use Spoon to aggregate our end-to-end tests and capture screenshots of our Android app. In order to save these screenshots, our app’s AndroidManifest.xml needs to declare the WRITE_STORAGE_PERMISSION permission.

However this is the only reason that our app needs this permission. We don’t write to external storage any other time in the actual app. So my goal was to remove this permission from our app manifest and see if I could instead declare it our test .apk.

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Exploring the Spilt in the support-v4 Library

Over a year ago the support library development team decided to split the monolithic support-v4 library up into several sub-libraries. This update, in version 24.2.0, meant that an app no longer needed to depend on the entire support-v4 library and could instead depend on only those sub libraries that it needed.

Until now I have yet to implement this update on any of my work or personal projects. This week as part of a general dependency audit, we decided to split up our support-v4 dependencies.

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