https://codebyramiz.com/blog/ Articles on building, testing and shipping Android and iOS apps. en-us Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://codebyramiz.com/blog/flutter-vs-react-native/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/flutter-vs-react-native/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT I have a production Flutter app on both stores, and React Native experience that is brownfield, SDK and sample work. Here is how the two render according to their docs, what my Flutter app needed from native code, and when I pick native instead. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Flutter React Native Cross-Platform Architecture https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-android-studio/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-android-studio/ Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Claude Code plugin for Android Studio shows diffs in the IDE and lets the agent read lint, but the phone is reached from the terminal. Counts from my agents' transcripts: thousands of leased adb commands, almost no use of Google's android CLI, a screenshot path that kept returning black frames, and a guard hook whose biggest rule mostly blocked commands that only mentioned a script. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI Agents Claude Code Android Testing https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-compact/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-compact/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Claude Code compact replaces your conversation with a summary. The docs list what survives and what does not. I counted compactions across 4,121 of my own session transcripts, and here is the one rule I follow because of it. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Context Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-hooks/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-hooks/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Three Claude Code sessions each launched about twelve background commands and crowded a 12-core Mac, and no session could see the others. A CLAUDE.md rule cannot fix that; a hook can. Three hooks I run on every session: a budget guard that blocks background fan-out before it starts, a Stop hook that refuses to end a turn on an unverified still-running claim, and a cleanup pass that reaps what a session leaves behind. Which event each one hangs on, what the contract allows, and the two places mine are still wrong. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Workflow Automation https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-pricing/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-pricing/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Claude Code pricing depends on how you sign in: a subscription plan with usage limits, or pay-per-token through the API. Here is what Anthropic's pricing page and cost docs said on 2026-10-26, quoted and linked, with no numbers from memory. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Pricing Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-statusline/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-statusline/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT A Claude Code statusline is a shell command that reads JSON on stdin and prints one line under the prompt. Here is the setting, the fields the docs list, the settings.json scopes, and my own script that shows context used and five-hour and seven-day usage with reset times. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Settings Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-subagents/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-subagents/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT A subagent is its own context window with its own prompt, tools and permissions. The docs say to delegate verbose or self-contained work that can return a summary, and to stay inline when it needs back-and-forth. Here is the shape, the decision table, and the bounded brief I hand over. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Subagents Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-vs-cursor/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-vs-cursor/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT I have used the Cursor CLI and Claude Code as bounded-task workers, and I keep a results log of the tasks I dispatch. Here are the counts from that log (9 Cursor composer rows, 20 Claude Sonnet rows), the failures, one older three-tool benchmark that did not include Claude Code, and the Cursor and Claude claims that come from their own docs. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Cursor Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-yolo-mode/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-yolo-mode/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT YOLO mode, the bypassPermissions mode behind --dangerously-skip-permissions. Here is what the docs say it removes, why I run auto mode with a long allowlist instead, and the one hook guard I added for a failure I actually saw. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Permissions Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-md-file/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-md-file/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT A CLAUDE.md file is loaded into every session, so a long one costs context and, per the docs, reduces adherence. I cut mine from 3,639 words to 512 with a pointer index, then let it regrow to 9,555. Here is what belongs in it, what doesn't, and the numbers from my own git history. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code CLAUDE.md Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/codex-exec-script/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/codex-exec-script/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Codex exec runs Codex without the interactive screen, so you can call it from a script. The docs cover sandbox, stdin and the output file. They do not describe a timeout, so I added one, plus an exit-code rule: no verdict is never a pass. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Codex Automation Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/codex-vs-claude-code/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/codex-vs-claude-code/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT I run Claude Code as the agent that plans, edits and dispatches, and Codex as the independent reviewer that returns a binary VERDICT on the changes I send it. Here is where each one sits in my workflow, one real failure the gate caught, and what I did not compare. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Codex Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/flaky-mobile-ui-tests/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/flaky-mobile-ui-tests/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT A run that never produced a test result is not a flaky test and not a failing one. Here are seven red or incomplete runs from my Android logs, how I classified each, the one failure I could reproduce on purpose, and the ones I never explained. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Testing Android Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/gemini-cli-vs-claude-code/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/gemini-cli-vs-claude-code/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT If you want Gemini CLI vs Claude Code, my logs cannot give it to you: I have no Gemini CLI runs, only Gemini models run through Antigravity (22 rows) next to 20 Claude Code rows. Here are the counts, the failures, what Gemini CLI's own README says, and what I did not measure. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Gemini Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/swiftui-vs-uikit/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/swiftui-vs-uikit/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Every one of my eight iOS apps imports both frameworks. Here are the file counts for SwiftUI and UIKit, the UIKit types that keep appearing, Apple's quoted description of the bridging types, and what the counts cannot tell you. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) iOS SwiftUI UIKit Architecture https://codebyramiz.com/blog/xcode-mcp/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/xcode-mcp/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Xcode ships an MCP server that an agent started outside Xcode can use to build and act on your project. Here is Apple's setup, quoted, and four things I saw when I wired it to Claude Code on Xcode 27.0 on 2026-09-29. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code iOS Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-skills/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/claude-code-skills/ Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT You write a detailed SKILL.md, and your agent still ignores it and improvises from scratch. I run 130 skills across three Claude Code profiles, and whether one gets used comes down to its description, a lean procedure with detail in side files, and one shared folder instead of copies. Here is what decides whether an agent loads and follows a skill. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Claude Code Workflow Automation https://codebyramiz.com/blog/google-play-target-api-level-checklist/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/google-play-target-api-level-checklist/ Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Play Console warns that your app must target a newer API level, and the app has not been built in a year. Here is the requirement as Google states it and the order I raise targetSdk in. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Android Release Google Play https://codebyramiz.com/blog/agent-says-tests-passed/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/agent-says-tests-passed/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT A change came back with 768 passing tests reported. An independent reviewer, which did not rerun them, found two High bugs those tests did not cover. Another reviewer found no blocking issues in static review and still failed a module, because it could not run the tests itself. Here are the three checks I put between an AI coding agent and the word done: a hook that checks status claims, a binary verdict from a reviewer that did not write the code, and exit codes that separate a failure from a run that never produced a result. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Testing Workflow Android iOS https://codebyramiz.com/blog/coding-agent-rate-limit-ladder/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/coding-agent-rate-limit-ladder/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Your coding agent just ran out of quota. Waiting kills the afternoon, and pasting the prompt into whatever tool is open wastes your best model on small work. Here is the ordered fallback ladder I run instead: free models first, paid rows one step at a time, automatic retries only when nothing was written, and a journal that decides the order. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted AI Agents Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/running-multiple-claude-code-agents/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/running-multiple-claude-code-agents/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Every guide to running multiple Claude Code agents in parallel says the same thing: give each one its own git worktree. That keeps the files apart. It doesn't keep the machine apart. On my setup, several sessions share a 12-core Mac, a Windows build PC and seven test phones, and what broke was never a merge conflict. It was CPU oversubscription, two test runs fighting over one port, phones left awake around the clock, a disk that went from 56 GB free to 1 GB overnight, and a test run that sat hung for seven hours. The guards that fixed each one, with the real config. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Multi-Agent Workflow Android iOS https://codebyramiz.com/blog/clean-architecture-ai-agents/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/clean-architecture-ai-agents/ Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI agents write most of the code in my apps and I don't read it line by line. The clean architecture still has to hold, because the next feature, the next SDK swap and the next agent all depend on it. What I found: a rule written into a prompt decays, a boundary test doesn't, and a reviewer that isn't the writer catches layer mistakes before they become code. Real tests, a real reviewer verdict, and one boundary that did break. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Clean Architecture Android iOS https://codebyramiz.com/blog/admob-zero-ad-requests/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/admob-zero-ad-requests/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT AdMob reported zero ad requests for an app with people actively using it. Consent and app-ads.txt could not explain it: the build that reached the store had been compiled with ads off, because one git-ignored file was missing from the build machine. That case, the same fault on iOS, and the different failure that hides behind a 0% match rate. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AdMob Release Engineering Android iOS https://codebyramiz.com/blog/your-app-should-still-be-yours/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/your-app-should-still-be-yours/ Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT If the person who builds your app stopped answering tomorrow, could someone else ship a fix next week? Two real handovers show where that question actually gets decided: eight months of work that had never reached the shared repository, arriving as a single commit, and an agency-built app whose App Store upload key sat in the repository. Then the checklist of what your business has to own, and what a developer should only ever be granted access to. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) App Handover App Rescue Mobile Development https://codebyramiz.com/blog/agent-drives-a-real-iphone/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/agent-drives-a-real-iphone/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT An agent will implement your iOS feature, write the test, and run it — then stop at the only question that matters: does this work on a phone? Two walls stand between you and letting it drive the device. The first is iOS itself: on Android a cable and a debugging switch inject a tap into any handset, while nothing on a physical iPhone accepts one without a signed on-device agent and a live tunnel. The second is self-inflicted — the assumption that the agent must work a pointer like a person, which makes the automation unusable even when it works. Here is the receipt from a real session, the three honest tiers of physical-device driving, the exact commands to reproduce the whole loop yourself, and the two bugs a simulator could never have caught. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) iOS Test Automation AI Agents https://codebyramiz.com/blog/contact-actions-without-permissions/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/contact-actions-without-permissions/ Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT A row of quick actions under a phone number — call it, text it, save it, share it — looks like a convenience and builds like a permissions grab. The naive version asks the OS to place calls, send texts, and write to the address book: a runtime prompt in front of a button the user tapped because they were ready to act, a store-policy tripwire on Android, and a privacy disclosure on both platforms it never needed. None of it is required, because none of those actions is something the app has to do itself. Here's the permission-free version on Android and iOS, and the per-platform permission audits that prove it. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Android iOS Permissions https://codebyramiz.com/blog/regression-testing-when-fixes-break-things/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/regression-testing-when-fixes-break-things/ Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT A one-line change did exactly what it was meant to: it made a half-finished unit of work report itself as a failure instead of a fake success. It shipped in the afternoon it was written. Before the day was out it had to be fixed again — because that honest little fix had quietly taught the app to abandon entire batches of work, without an error, a crash, or a single line in any dashboard. That's a regression: a bug your own progress created, invisible from the inside. Here's the one that got caught, and the test that now catches it for good. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Android Testing Regressions https://codebyramiz.com/blog/android-ios-feature-parity/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/android-ios-feature-parity/ Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Most companies with two mobile apps have one real product and one approximation of it. The gap never appears on a dashboard, because parity is nobody's number — it grows one reasonable 'we'll port that later' at a time, and the users on the weaker platform don't file tickets about features they've never seen. Taking a production Android app to iOS, screen by screen, taught me what closing that gap actually takes: an adversarial inventory of every surface, proof that filters mean the same thing and not just look the same, and the discipline to write down which differences are deliberate. Here's the method, with the failures it caught. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Android iOS Feature Parity https://codebyramiz.com/blog/crash-free-and-still-broken/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/crash-free-and-still-broken/ Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Your dashboard says 99.5% crash-free and your reviews say the app doesn't work. Both are true, because crashes are the failure class users actually forgive — they're loud, they're recoverable, and the app tells you about them. The expensive ones are silent: a send queue stuck in a state nothing reports, a concurrent write that leaves two people believing different things, a query that quietly stops matching real data. Nobody files a ticket for those. They just leave. Here's what those failures look like from the inside, and what to instrument so the app tells you instead of your reviews. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Android iOS Stability https://codebyramiz.com/blog/your-app-hasnt-shipped-in-a-year/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/your-app-hasnt-shipped-in-a-year/ Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Your app hasn't shipped an update in a year, and everyone has quietly agreed that's fine because nothing is on fire. It isn't fine: a frozen app is on a clock set by Apple and Google, not by you. In four rescues the blocker was never that the code couldn't be changed — it was a pipeline nobody could run, a build only one person could produce, a store gate nobody had decoded, or a platform floor that rose while the team stood still. Here's what's actually decaying, and the order I'd unblock it in. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Android iOS Release https://codebyramiz.com/blog/your-app-does-not-need-every-phone/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/your-app-does-not-need-every-phone/ Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT You cannot test an Android app on every phone. The device matrix is unbounded, and it changes without you shipping anything — a third-party update can break a flow that was proven working last month. So what do you actually have to prove? A four-device bench with a written ledger of what is and isn't covered, field telemetry filtered hard enough to trust, fallbacks that fail loudly instead of silently, and OEM work that expands only when a recorded failure calls for it. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Android https://codebyramiz.com/blog/surviving-app-store-guideline-4-2-3i/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/surviving-app-store-guideline-4-2-3i/ Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Apple rejected my app under Guideline 4.2.3(i) — Minimum Functionality — for requiring WhatsApp to be installed. Building a complete standalone send path wasn't enough: the next build was rejected on the same guideline. What actually cleared it was the empty first-launch screen, and an appeal made of screenshots instead of argument. What the guideline is really testing, and the five things I'd check before you resubmit. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) iOS https://codebyramiz.com/blog/two-agents-one-repo/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/two-agents-one-repo/ Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The dangerous thing about an AI coding agent isn't that it writes bad code — it's that it will tell you the work is done when it isn't. A skipped test reported as passing. A readiness summary that says PASS over a build that actually died. The method that's held up for me on a production mobile codebase: split the planner from the coder so nothing approves its own work, and keep the state that matters in files instead of the chat. The loop, the artifacts, and the four questions to ask anyone putting AI on your app. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) AI-Assisted Multi-Agent Workflow https://codebyramiz.com/blog/the-audit-that-found-nothing/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/the-audit-that-found-nothing/ Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT A full audit of an Android codebase came back with one line: no verified bugs found. That's either the best sentence in engineering or the most worthless one — and the difference is entirely in the process. Here's what had to happen first before I'd believe it. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Android Testing AI-Assisted https://codebyramiz.com/blog/stabilize-before-you-rewrite/ https://codebyramiz.com/blog/stabilize-before-you-rewrite/ Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT You inherited an unstable mobile app and someone has already said 'just rewrite it.' A rewrite trades a known set of bugs for an unknown one and deletes years of edge-case handling that exists nowhere else. Here's the five-step playbook I run instead — profile before touching anything, kill the worst pain in place, add boundaries so fixes hold, repair the release pipeline, and only then decide whether a rewrite has actually been earned. hello@codebyramiz.com (Ramiz Raja) Android iOS Flutter