iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 28/09/2026

Something that has become even more obvious with AI is that people only value the things you actually put time and effort into. Every dev out there vibecoding sass and tools in a few prompts and no one using them.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 28/09/2026

If you cannot differentiate if a test failed because you introduced a regression or just because you are refactoring the subject under test, then you don’t have a test, but something else. A test has exactly 0 value if this is the case.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 27/09/2026

Ask "help me plan a trip to Rome", it renders native cards + a checklist. Tick "flights booked", the agent sees it, swaps in hotel picks. Instead of chatting to an agent and getting walls of text in return, you get complete UI flows shaped up as you speak to match your needs as a user. Promising 💯

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 27/09/2026

Compose A2UI renderer is the type of tool that can change the nature and the future or Android apps. Imagine an app where some parts of its UI or flows are fully dynamic and delegated to an agent 👇

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 24/08/2026

This is precisely the type of thing I expected you to build 💯💪

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 21/08/2026

A quick reflection on AI and what we decide it to be 🧠🤔

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 21/08/2026

One of the most exciting things about AI is the opportunity to make things better. Not everything has to be a race to monetize it. Expose injustice. Solve real human problems. Advance medical research. Make our lives easier. There’s so much more we could be building!

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 20/08/2026

Global ranking of testers for get12testers.com 🏆💯

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Reposted by Jorge Castillo

Heron @heron.social · 17/08/2026

Heron 3.0.9 is out with performance improvements, and an even more immersive gallery 😊

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 16/08/2026

OpenJDK is another example of a company forbidding the use of AI in contributions. openjdk.org/legal/ai

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 15/08/2026

Can’t blame him. It’s really tiring and risky to keep up with changes submitted by people who don’t fully understand them, especially in an OSS library. It also feels disrespectful to the maintainers. Is it the best decision for OSS? I’m curious to hear what you think.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 15/08/2026

Jake Wharton announced yesterday that all the Lysine projects (OkHttp, Okio, Retrofit, SQLDelight…) don’t allow contributors to use LLMs to generate code or write PR descriptions/comments.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 10/08/2026

IN THEORY AppFunctions is the implementation of MCP for Android. Official docs say that other apps and agents than Gemini should be able to use them. Reality is that it is now blocked for Gemini only. Not sure if there’s any intention to open up that permission to other apps in the short-mid term.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 08/08/2026

Nano banana 2 and gpt images seem to do great work too. I had a prompt that produced pretty good results.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 08/08/2026

AI agents can be very powerful and convenient when it comes to exploration and analysis. Use them wisely. You can now bring back to life some of those long delayed challenges that you couldn’t ever prioritize or you had no idea how to tackle. Time to do some big improvements to your Android apps 🤗

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 08/08/2026

And if you give it access to your repo via gh client, that’s even better since it’ll compare your change history with the dates were regressions started happening.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 08/08/2026

Claude can tell you why your Android app performance isn’t great on some specific devices. You can feed it some traces and it will analyze them, learn your codebase and likely point you to the culprit.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 04/08/2026

I don’t know if I ever shared this here, but I created a platform to help Android devs overcome the 12 testers for 14 days Google Play requirement to unlock production. Completely free. Android devs helping each other. You test apps, and you get credits to list yours for test 👇 get12testers.com

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 19/07/2026

No IMAX theatres close to my town 😩

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 19/07/2026

I’m sad I cannot watch it on IMAX 😭

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 19/07/2026

I’ve also felt that way about ASG. ASG has been great and it still is, but the big issue it has is that it is always the same people, getting older. Not many new folks joining. My experience as a 40yo dev is that you relax and reorder your life priorities. A community needs young people, more active

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 17/07/2026

I think there are lots of new Android devs but maybe not a sense of community or networking. They don’t gather like we did. Times change and the way people interact also does. As long as Android phones are massively used there will be Android devs

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 17/07/2026

That’s fair but I don’t see almost anyone sharing any productive content either. Everyone seems just inactive.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 15/07/2026

That’s what I wonder. I’m not sure why but there was a moment where the community diluted forever. And it was exactly the moment when everyone moved from X to other places like Mastodon and BlueSky.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 15/07/2026

Is the Android community still alive in any social network? Every time I ask about this people say it’s mostly BlueSky but I see people highly inactive here. I wonder if I’m not following the right people

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 18/06/2026

People think 60fps means you’ve got 16.67ms to run each frame of your app. Nope. That time window is not full for your app to use 👇

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 18/06/2026

I still want to see how much this affects to the average oss project, to be fair. I suspect some people have very aggressive CD pipelines and they might be deploying new versions daily. Those might be the ones hitting limits.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 17/05/2026

Skills are not free, and people are choosing to stay a bit silent about it. Thought it might be good to put some thoughts together about this 👇 The Downsides of Agentic Skills open.substack.com/pub/effectiv...

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Skills are seductive.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 17/05/2026

AI codes for us most of the time now, either we like it or not. I created thedroid.club to push myself to explore how to leverage AI for improving my proficiency as Android developer. Surrounding yourself by people with your same interests always makes a big difference. Great decision so far 💯

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 31/01/2026

This is what Gemini generated about all our conversations so far 🤩

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 31/01/2026

Mobile is dead. Design is cooked. Programmers are done. Funny how the things AI supposedly killed are exactly the ones people are thriving in more than ever.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 29/01/2026

My real honest take is that you likely cannot find any other Compose course like this one out there. That is the truth. This course is the culmination of several years of careful exploration and diving deep into Jetpack Compose ❤️‍🔥 effectiveandroid.gumroad.com/l/dfedea

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 27/01/2026

“Mobile dev is dead” Meanwhile: more apps published to the stores than ever, more users than ever, more phones than ever. As long as people use phones, mobile development will exist.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 26/01/2026

Backgrounds became an order of magnitude better on the platform now. Just added support for lots of beautiful ones! Go test them 🔥📸📱

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 26/01/2026

Software devs coming to teach you clean architecture in 2026. Now more than ever

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 26/01/2026

Just realised something. This type of feature should be in ScreenshotWhale. It just makes a lot of sense. A predefined set of backgrounds with fancy gradients that you can apply to either a single screenshot or all screenshots in a project.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 25/01/2026

Not in my plans to lie showing a fake % improvement in conversions if you use screenshots created with ScreenshotWhale. Some products are doing that. What I’ll do is give you the best tool possible to achieve the goal. Then you decide if it’s good enough to make a difference 🤷‍♂️

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 24/01/2026

More and more people are starting to realise that nobody wants to consume generated content in social media. Being authentic has always been the only way, and now more than ever. Sharing real stuff and learning together with your audience.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 24/01/2026

Just finished another quality of life improvement that users will welcome. Save requests should be way faster now 🤩 Before, save was sending the full list of devices, with all their screenshots and layers. Now it calculates deltas and only sends the affected layers.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 24/01/2026

Early feedback from power users is key for any product. It helps you shape it up in a more appropriate/realistic/efficient direction, instead of guessing. Give users what they want. I’m living this myself with ScreenshotWhale. It is evolving so much lately 👏👏

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 22/01/2026

Believe me when I say that your users couldn’t care less about your app being vibe coded or not. They just care about the value it provides them.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 22/01/2026

They need to be. And we must advocate for that.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 22/01/2026

If everyone is using AI at work, it makes no sense to forbid it in tech interviews.

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 22/01/2026

Worked on something incredibly cool last night 🙈 Let me introduce automatic internationalization of your App Store and Play Store screenshots with ScreenshotWhale ✨🔥

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 22/01/2026

Nothing good is instant. Real value compounds when you keep showing up. I could’ve made ScreenshotWhale paid-only from day one. Instead, I let people try it, feel the value, and decide. I think it’s finally at that point now. Fingers crossed 🤞

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Jorge Castillo @jorgecastillo.dev · 20/01/2026

Most developers are not designers, and that is totally fine. This is where a powerful drag and drop editor shines. It gives you structure so screenshots look consistent and intentional, helping you bootstrap solid App Store assets fast without a designer.

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