Scalable Android Architecture, Testing & Security for African Apps

Course outline and learning expectations

This is a tutor-led course. The outline shows what your tutor will cover; teaching materials and examinations are provided directly to enrolled students.

What you will learn

• Design maintainable Android applications with clear UI, data and domain boundaries.
• Apply dependency injection and interface-driven design to reduce coupling and improve testability.
• Structure a growing codebase into purposeful modules without unnecessary complexity.
• Build unit, integration and Compose UI tests around critical user journeys.
• Protect personal, financial and location data with secure storage, safe networking and least-privilege permissions.
• Design adaptive, accessible and localisable interfaces for diverse African users and devices.
• Diagnose crashes, memory problems, slow screens and unstable data flows using evidence from development tools.
• Refactor a complex African service app into a secure, tested and scalable codebase.

Modules

1. 1

   Architecture for change

   Review separation of concerns, single source of truth and unidirectional data flow.

   Define UI, data and domain boundaries around business capabilities.Use result models and explicit error handling instead of hidden failure paths.
2. 2

   Dependency injection and maintainable boundaries

   Introduce constructor injection and dependency inversion.

   Configure Hilt modules, scopes and test replacements.Keep Android framework types away from business logic where practical.
3. 3

   Reactive state and complex workflows

   Combine Flows safely and control lifecycle-aware collection.

   Model long-running operations, validation, retries and recoverable errors.Prevent duplicated events, stale screens and accidental concurrency bugs.
4. 4

   Purposeful modularisation

   Identify feature, data, core and app-module responsibilities.

   Build for high cohesion, low coupling and controlled public APIs.Use convention plugins or shared build logic to keep module configuration consistent.
5. 5

   Automated testing strategy

   Create a risk-based test plan for business rules and critical journeys.

   Write fast unit tests for ViewModels, use cases and repositories.Add database, API-boundary and Compose UI tests with deterministic test data.
6. 6

   Android security and privacy

   Apply least-privilege permissions and minimise sensitive data collection.

   Protect local secrets with Android Keystore-backed approaches and secure network configuration.Threat-model authentication, payments, deep links, exported components and app backups.
7. 7

   Adaptive, accessible and localisable products

   Build adaptive layouts for phones, tablets, foldables and multi-window use.

   Test semantic labels, contrast, focus order, touch targets and text scaling.Externalise strings and prepare content for regional languages, currencies, numbers and dates.
8. 8

   Quality diagnostics and refactoring capstone

   Use profilers and inspection tools to investigate memory, rendering, database and network issues.

   Add crash reporting interfaces, structured logs and privacy-aware diagnostic context.Refactor an African Field Operations app into modules with secure authentication, offline data, automated tests and adaptive screens.