LastApp Copilot - Launch your app today

For the last 15 years we have built my own iOS and Android apps, scaling them to 900 million downloads. At one point, 4 of every 1,000 downloads on Android Market/Play Store was one of our apps. 12 of the top 100 photography apps are by us.

We are bringing that experience to LastApp Copilot.

LastApp Copilot helps teams launch profitable businesses rather than prototypes. We help take apps from ideas to polished products you would be proud of launching, helping across development, QA, security, UI/UX, app store publishing, ASO, monetization, and growth of your vibecoded app as needed.

Excited to share what we have been working on at LastApp AI.

Missing Guide for App Bundles

App Bundles is an amazing feature for Android Developers. It helps reduce the app size for quicker downloads without having to worry about building for every architecture separately. Bundletool provides command line too to help with testing App Bundles before publishing the app.

Bundletool docs seem to miss critical information to complete testing for developers today. This guide hopes to fill the missing gaps in bundletool docs and help developers migrate to App Bundles.

This blog post mainly covers 2 crucial missing options in bundletool:

1. How to Run bundletool ?
2. How to test real production APKs?

Running bundletool: You can download latest version of bundletool from Github. Note that this includes a jar file with name bundletool-all-X.Y.Z.jar (Where X.Y.Z indicates the version number of the bundletool). You can just bundletool as a jar file. 

Example: java -jar bundletool-all-0.10.0.jar build-apks --bundle=app.aab --output=myapks.apks

This will build single file with all required APKs for all architectures and screen sizes.

Now how to you install the required APK on your device to test the APK? Its a simple bundletool command.

Example: java -jar bundletool-all-0.10.0.jar install-apks --apks= myapks.apks

This will ensure right APK is installed for your test device. In case adb is not your system path make sure to specify where the path is for your adb.

Example: java -jar bundletool-all-0.10.0.jar install-apks --adb=/ADBABSPATH/adb --apks= myapks.apks

The problem with this is bundletool creates APKs that are signed with the debug keystore found in your user path. So how to create APKs with release signatures? bundletool has the option to generate APKs with release signature. 

Example: java -jar bundletool-all-0.10.0.jar build-apks --bundle=app.aab --output= myapks.apks --ks=/PATHTOKEYSTORE/YOURKEYSTORE.keystore --ks-pass=pass:PASSWORD1 --ks-key-alias=yourkeyalias --key-pass=pass:PASSWORD2

Hope this helps while migrating from APKs to App Bundles for you.

Secure Facebook Browsing

It is common that most websites use HTTPS for user authentication and use HTTP for everything else. This leaves users vulnerable to Cookie Hijacking. Tools like Firesheep brought this to forefront. It lets someone in your network perform Cookie Hijacking of Facebook as simple as installing Firefox Extension.

The best way to avoid this hack is to completely use HTTPS when using Facebook but the way Facebook work, even if you go to https://www.facebook.com (Secure HTTPS page), all the links still point to http://www.facebook.com (unsecure HTTP page). This leaves Facebook users vulnerable to tools like FireSheep.

Here is a Firefox Extension I wrote to solve the same problem for Firefox. Every time user visits Facebook.com, all the requests are forced to go through HTTPS even if user starts with http://www.facebook.com

Firefox Extension: Block Facebook from your life

Its impossible to be on web and not be a Facebook user these days. Even if you are not a Social Network user, Facebook is notified whenever you visit one of the more than one million sites on the web that use Facebook Connect and has a history of leaking personally identifiable information to third parties. Either way Facebook knows your web life.

Here is a Firefox Extension that completely blocks Facebook from your online life. It won't let you visit Facebook.com, It won't let Facebook track your moves using Facebook Connect.

WGET - Authentication

How to access a page using wget that requires authentication? wget is well equipped to handle multiple authentication scenario's.

HTTP Basic Athentication: To download a page that requires HTTP basic authentication use the following mechanism:
wget https://myUserName:myPassword@www.myserver.com/mypage.html
wget http://myUserName:myPassword@www.myserver.com/mypage.html

Form Post: To download a page protected by login built on form post use the following:

wget --post-data 'user=myUserName&password=myPassword' http://www.myserver/mypage.html

Form Post with multiple pages:If you need to navigate through multiple pages after authentication to get to your page, you can save cookies on form post for authentication and reuse the cookies file to access the page you want:

wget --post-data 'user=myUserName&password=myPassword' --cookies=on --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies=myCookies.txt http://www.myserver/auth

wget --cookies=on --load-cookies=myCookies.txt --keep-session-cookies --savecookies=myCookies.txt http://www.myserver/mypage.html

Hey Microsoft how about banning iTunes on windows?

Wouldn't it be interesting if Microsoft follows "CPU Hog" strategy from Jobs and ban iTunes on windows for installing malware that is "Memory Hog"?

Making No as Default in EXTJS Confirm Dialog

Currently there is no configuration that supports making "No" button as default for a Confirm dialog in ExtJS. So how to make no button as default?
One way to do this is to get Dialog and mark second button as default.

Here is the code snippet that makes no as default button:

var dialog = Ext.MessageBox.confirm('Confirm', 'Do you really mean it?' ,feedbackFunction).getDialog();
dialog.defaultButton = 2;
dialog.focus();