timber VS Moshi

To try and fix this problem fast I knew I needed some sort of logging and that is when I discovered Timber and Firebase Crashlynics. I then used THIS video to set both of them up and to create a decent crash reporting system.

Timber

Do you still use the Android Timber lib? The only real pro I see is that you don't need to declare the Tag, other than that that "pro" where each call checks if debug or not I wonder why you would like to have that, I mean what I want is all debug-only logs to get stripped out from the code, and instead of calling if(BuildConfig.Debug) on each Timer.xy() call why not create an extra Application class under the debug folder where logs are activated? Just trying to figure out of this lib that actually started like 9 years ago is still needed or not really anymore. https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber

One of the options could be to setup logging to the file within the app and sync it with backend once necessary or required. This could be achieved by using library, such as Timber and setting up local file. Depending on your constraints, such as file size, you might want to include a file rotation strategy, e.g. start a new file and remove the old one.

Timber for logging

Same as in Timber

Honestly, when you look at a build.gradle.kts written by someone who knows what they're doing, it's not that bad (that reminds me, I should really clean up the build.gradle.kts on my personal project, I haven't heavily edited it since I knew a lot less about gradle...). For example, here's the build.gradle.kts for Moshi, a JSON serialization library from Square. It uses the root build.gradle.kts for the project a bit, which is here. The root one is a little more complex, but that's mostly because it has to deal with a multi-release build and has to configure a few plugins, like dokka. (If you're wondering where all the library versions are, they're here, using a new feature in Gradle you might like: The version catalog)

Moshi

This approach is also used by square/moshi. You can also refer this.

Best practice in Android would be Moshi, which is written by many of the same authors as Gson but is still actively maintained. It's more or less a breaking upgrade from Gson.

Thanks for the info. Just checked the GitHub and it is indeed the case that Gson is not maintained anymore. The main dev left Google it seems and therefore abandoned Gson. He and some other people however created a new project called Moshi that's probably intended as a kind of Gson 3.0: https://github.com/square/moshi the last commit was three months ago and there are a crowd of contributors listed so I guess that's the better option than ye olde Gson.

Java annotations have enabled compile-time reflection since Java 1.6, and of course it has been used for serialization: https://github.com/square/moshi/#codegen

JSON de/serialization: Kotlin serialization, Moshi

However i am getting an error "Expected BEGIN-ARRAY but was BEGIN-OBJECT at $". Looking over the moshi documentation (https://github.com/square/moshi) I think I need to use an adapter as my JSON response starts with "{ }" not the expected "[ ]". I am just struggling to understand how to implement the adapter as I think the built in adapter should work.

Moshi users are currently blocked to update until Moshi 1.13.0 is released: https://github.com/square/moshi/issues/1368