Top Headlines

This project demonstrates various Android development skills, highlighting a Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architecture and modern best practices. While the design and functionality are intentionally minimal, this app serves as a foundation for creating a more feature-rich and polished real-world application.

Prerequisites

1. Obtain an API key from News API.
2. Copy the apikeys.properties.example file and rename it to apikeys.properties.
3. Add your News API key to the apikeys.properties file.

Features

• Fetch and display top headlines using the News API.
• Basic navigation and UI components powered by Jetpack Compose.
• Modern Android libraries and development patterns.

Architecture

This app follows the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architecture, widely recommended for Android projects. Architectural highlights include:

• Library Selection: Preference for official or officially recommended libraries by Google and JetBrains for better long-term support. For gaps, stable and widely used Android libraries are used.
• Layering: A simplified architecture tailored to the project’s scope while maintaining good code organization.
• Inspiration: Concepts and approaches derived from open-source projects like Now In Android.

Exploration: While experimenting with libraries like Decompose and Voyager in other projects, this app adopts a standard approach to align with industry best practices.

API Bridge

A custom ApiBridge was implemented, reusing concepts from my professional work. Key decisions include:

• Pagination: Set pageSize to 100 for simplicity, with the option to optimize by reducing it to 20 and implementing infinite scrolling.
• Result Class: Used for transferring data from the network layer to the ViewModel, leveraging coroutines for asynchronous operations.
• Source Filtering: Excluded the "google-news" source due to lower data quality.

Optimization Opportunity: Sources are fetched with every request. Implementing caching could reduce unnecessary API calls.

Error Management

Currently, error handling is basic and lacks localization. For production, robust and user-friendly error management is recommended.

Testing

Unit Tests

• Verifies that UI states reflect data correctly.
• Utilizes MainDispatcherRule with a custom UnconfinedTestDispatcher.
• Simulates HTTP requests with delays in fetchArticles() for realistic test behavior.
• Limitations: Mocking SavedStateHandle was not resolved, so articleId is passed as a parameter to the ViewModel.

Instrumented Tests

• Validates UI components and navigation behavior.
• Uses a TestTopHeadlinesApp to inject test dependencies.

Libraries Used

• Kotlinx (JetBrains):
  • Serialization
  • Coroutines
• Ktor: Lightweight library for network operations.
• Compose Navigation: Enables typed and declarative navigation.
• Material 3: Modern Material Design 3 components with a custom theme generated using the Material 3 Theme Builder.
• Coil: Efficient image loading library.
• Koin: Dependency injection framework.

Limitations and Future Improvements

1. Experimental APIs: Replace experimental APIs with stable alternatives for production use.
2. Additional Features:
   • Pull-to-refresh for better user experience.
   • In-app country selection for customized news feeds.
   • Detailed article metadata display (e.g., date, author, source).
3. Error Management: Implement robust and localized error handling.
4. API Optimization: Cache sources to reduce unnecessary API calls.

Time Spent

Approximately 10 hours were invested in developing this project, including setup, implementation, and testing.

Note: ChatGPT was used to format the README and improve the english syntax.