Develop Reference

How can I make a shape like this in Jetpack compose

I have tried several ways to recreate this shape but I have not succeeded in any of them.
I know it should be done on canvas and points, but my problem is the outline and the combination of points. with arching of the corners

android canvas draw text partial

on a canvas is it possible to draw text but make half of it not show up (as if it is being drawn partially off of the canvas, but actually not being off the canvas). i have an indicator on a "graph" with some text and it follows the point but I do not want the text to be drawn out of the graph portion (i am drawing other stuff outside that area).
I also have a background on the layout behind the canvas so I cannot just paint with a bitmap because that would cause some aspect ratio/sizing issues (wouldn't look good).
I have tried looking for answers all over Google, Stack overflow, and by experimentation with no avail. On Google I found many interesting things about drawing text on an android canvas but nothing that I was looking fore, I am pretty stumped, and I am starting to think that what I want is not even possible, and i may need to draw the text custom with points or figure out an alternative that looks just as good.

It's absolutely possible. Probably the fastest is to use clipRect to limit drawing to your graph portion. See this answer: Using clipRect - explanation
The reference on the various forms of clipRect is here: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Canvas.html#clipRect(android.graphics.Rect, android.graphics.Region.Op)
If I recall, the whole operation will look something like:
yourCanves.save()
yourCanvas.clipRect(...)
yourCanvas.drawText(...)
yourCanvas.restore()
The restore() call serves to undo the clipRect so you can draw outside it for later drawing.

The simplest solution that popped in my mind, would be to cut using substring the text that you want to dispaly.
Example:
if(MyString >5){
canvas.drawText("VeryLongTe...");
}

Android: Custom masking 2 bitmaps layered one above the other

easy now.
What I want eventually:
I want to have 2 bitmaps overlayed on a view. Same bitmaps with the one above have higher brightness than the below one.
Now when the user strokes(with touch event (like paint brush)) on the upper bitmap, I want those parts of the upper bitmap to go invisible.
For those who are familiar with adobe photoshop perhaps this will make more sense:
I want to draw a mask on an image being display so that only the unmasked parts remain visible. But the mask can be drawn from a brush with variable hardness/size.
How do I achieve this functionality? Direct me in in the line where I should research or give sample code.
Also, is it possible to draw strokes on an imageview with a brush which has variable hardness? I know that I can drawPath and drawArc on a canvas, but I do not know how to achieve the different brush strokes/styles.
Please pardon me if I haven't phrased my question right, or wasn't able to find similar duplicates.

You can use FrameLayout to overlay one image over other in Android and for Custom Masking search FingerPaint on google.

I think the best way is to do your own off-screen compositing, then render the composited image using an ImageView or perhaps a subclass with custom interaction. See this sample code for an example of how to do such compositing using the Porter-Duff transfer modes.

Draw a Circle With Reverse Filling in Android

Not sure how to do this, or what the right terms are for describing this, but here goes:
I want to make a closing circle animation in my android app, much like the end of this video. I'm guessing what I need to do is somehow draw a black circle but instead of filling the inside of the circle fill the outside. How exactly would I do that, given the tools I have with Android's Canvas class?

Have you tried using clipPath to achieve this?
I was working on the same kind of thing and achieved it by using clipPath of canvas.

android Paint.setShadowLayer() vs Canvas.drawbitmap() problems

I use the following code to draw a bitmap during onDraw of a custom View
Paint p = new Paint(Paint.ANTI_ALIAS_FLAG|Paint.FILTER_BITMAP_FLAG);
p.setShadowLayer(3,3,3,0xff000000);
Bitmap bmp = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(some drawable jpg);
canvas.drawBitmap(bmp,null,new Rect(blah blah),p);
and the shadow looks funny. What do I mean funny? I mean that I get a different shadow then if I was calling canvas.drawRect(). It looks sorta like the android shadow code is treating the bitmap as an alpha channel or something.
have tried adding p.setColor(0xff000000); and p.setStyle(Paint.Style.FILL); but not difference.
I guess I could drawRect with shadow on, then drawBitmap with shadow off, but that seems silly as it would be rendering pixels twice.

Basically the shadow layer doesn't work for anything except text. It's real dumb. Check the Android hardware acceleration supported operations chart.
This question was asked back in 2010 when hardware accelerated view trees didn't exist.. based on things I've read, even then the shadow layer only worked for simple shapes (if at all), and others got weird results using it on anything but text. You might be out of luck.
Finally, there are many ways you can fake a shadow layer. You can wrap a view in another view and draw underneath it. You can write a view that draws the shadow yourself as a radial gradient, etc. But you probably just want to make a 9patch that looks like a shadow and use that.
2018 Update
It looks like most of the operations are supported as of api 28! I haven't had a chance to play around with shadow layers recently, but things are looking much more optimistic now.

Maybe http://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Paint.html#isAntiAlias()
can help you.
paint.setAntiAlias(true);

Maybe you should have different Paint objects for different purposes like text, bitmap, etc. So one's setting will not affect others.