Android apps: four things you only find out on a real phone

August 18, 2026

* This one is about Android apps.

A designer who can't read code shipped twenty apps

These days you don't have to be a developer to build an app.

I can't read code and I can't write it either. I'm a designer, and I have never studied programming. Over the past two months I've built close to twenty apps, and four of them went up on Google Play last week. Three are on the store now; the fourth is still in review.

I didn't even do the design.

One of them, a mental arithmetic app for kids called Beongaesem, took four rebuilds of the APK before it was right. Everything worked on the computer. Every time I installed it on the phone, a different problem was waiting. All four were the same kind of problem, and not one of them showed up on the computer screen.

I couldn't see the status bar icons

At the very top of an Android screen there is a clock, a battery and a Wi-Fi icon. That strip is the status bar.

Beongaesem has a dark background up there, so the icons need to be white. They came out black, and against a dark background that means no clock and no battery.

I asked Claude Code to fix it three times. Three times nothing changed.

"Can this really not be done? There's no way."

I was still poking at it when I switched to another app and came back, and the icons were white.

Black the first time I opened it. White after going to another app and coming back.

I wrote that one line and sent it. Thirty seconds later the cause came back.

White on the way back meant the fix was working. The code was not wrong. Something else was overwriting the setting, and only on the very first launch.

Only one screen shows up on the first launch and never again: the splash screen with the logo.

That was it. The splash screen is not drawn on top of the app. It is a separate window, and it was setting the status bar to its own default, then disappearing without putting it back.

When you report a bug, saying when it behaves differently beats saying "it doesn't work" every time. First launch versus coming back to it. Light mode versus dark. Whether it changes a few seconds in.

One press of the back button closed the app

The app was built to need two presses to quit. The first press shows a small message: press again to exit.

On the phone, one press closed it.

Android had changed underneath me. Recent versions turn on something called predictive back by default, and back-button code written the old way is ignored.

No error. No warning. It just doesn't run. Which is why it looked fine everywhere except the phone.

The icon edges were cut off

On the home screen, the edges of the app icon were clipped.

Depending on the manufacturer and the phone's settings, Android will show your icon as a circle, a square, or a rounded square. So an app icon has to be drawn with generous margins around the edge.

I still don't have a feel for how much to enlarge the artwork inside that margin. Early on I kept changing the ratio and the padding, and at one point I filled the whole square with exactly what was on my screen.

The title ended up right under the clock

The app title came out almost touching the clock at the top of the screen.

Recent Android versions draw your app all the way to the edges of the display. The system used to reserve the strip where the clock lives. Now your app has to measure that strip and leave it clear itself.

It looked clean on the computer. On the phone the title was jammed under the status bar and the whole screen felt tight.

So now I check these four first

None of the four was a broken feature. The code was running correctly every time. The problem was that a phone is not a computer screen.

So with a new app, the first thing I do after installing the APK is check these four.

The next post picks up after the app is finished: getting it into the store, where what stopped me was paperwork and settings rather than code.