Summary

My professional career as an Android Engineer started back in 2011 at the startup Runtastic GmbH in Linz, Austria.
Runtastic created Mobile Apps in the Health and Fitness sector.
Runtastic quickly started to lift off and was acquired by Adidas in 2015 for €220 million.
To be part of a startup which grew and finally gets acquired by a huge company was definitely the biggest highlight in my career.

In my first few years at Runtastic I was working on multiple Android Apps and later on switched to the “Core- Services” team, which focuses on providing the best possible Developer Experience and a library foundation to other teams.
In 2022, after more than 11 years, I decided it is time for a change.
In September 2024 adidas announced to shutdown the Runtastic offices (reference - unfortunately nothing can be found on the official adidas-group.com page)…

Since January 2023 I am part of the Bitmovin Android Player team.
At Bitmovin we create a Video Player SDK for B2B customers.

If I have some spare time at the computer, I am also interested in tools like docker and selfhosting.

Career

Bitmovin (2023-01 - )

Senior Software Engineer Android

At Bitmovin we provide an Android VideoPlayer-API to business customers.
In this field, it is crucial to always have possible performance implications on your mind (Video Playback).
Also it is very important to keep the customers perspective of the API in mind.

Main topics during my work at Bitmovin:

  • Automate release flow via GitHub Actions
  • “Merging” the Bitmovin Analytics and Bitmovin Player libraries into an “umbrella library”. This enables our customers to easily make use of the Analytics tool, without further manual integration
  • Keeping the ExoPlayer fork up to date
  • Fix bugs reported by customers
  • Improving and extending the public facing API
  • Diving into Backend: Handling Licensing requests, Google Cloud, Spring Boot, debugging legacy Go code

Runtastic (2011-03 - 2022-12)

Senior Software Engineer Android

During the first few years at Runtastic, there was not much structure and a very small team, so I touched everything there was in regards to Android.
As Runtastic grew and was acquired by Adidas, more engineers were hired and some restructuring happened.
Since then (~2016) I was part of the “Core-Services” team.
The main focus of this team is to provide the best possible Developer Experience and a library foundation to other internal teams.

Some examples of my responsibilities:

  • Network layer (abstraction of okhttp, retrofit, json.API)
  • Database layer (SQLite, SQLDelight, Room)
  • Bluetooth layer (Heartrate belt, custom Smartwatches)
  • AccountManagement (Android System Account handling + sync)
  • APM integration (eg NewRelic, embrace.io)
  • Providing a stable setup of Jenkins CI/CD (in combination with selfhosted Atlassian Bitbucket)
  • Providing a stable and performant gradle setup, to handle multiple local libraries. (We dealt with ~150-200 local libraries, sometimes used them locally, but mostly pre-complied)

During this time I worked with many different tools (besides standard tools like AndroidStudio and cli), some of them are:

  • Charles Proxy
  • Postman
  • NewRelic and Embrace
  • sqlitebrowser
  • ProGuard and DexGuard

Interests

I am very much interested in decompiling, analyzing and understanding Android apps.
Especially if the app doesn’t work well with a rooted phone. (I am running on a rooted device since back in 2012 😄)

This led me to developing LSPosed modules to circumvent those restrictions.
(If you don’t know LSPosed, it is something like the XPosed successor in spirit. A framework to inject code during runtime.)
So I have some experience with writing Magisk modules and LSPosed modules.

Besides digging through the decompiled code, I am interested in monitoring the network requests certain apps are doing.
With the help of LSPosed, Magisk and a bit of decompiling, it is for most apps easy to make the network traffic clear text and take a deeper dive into their API 🤓

Education

2004 - 2009: HTL Braunau (Eletronics with focus on Technical Informatics)

Skills

• Kotlin • Java • Android • git • SQLite • Jenkins • Shell Scripting • Linux • and many more •