android - wafrat

Good bye Android, it was good while it lasted

When I first started this blog, my goal was to document my journey in Android development. beginning-android-day-1 dates back to Sept 2017. It's been 7 years. However I won't work with Android anymore. Here's why. Android Back when I learned Android in 2017, it was pretty rough. I had to

flutter

Fixing `Google Api Error: Invalid request - Your app targets Android 13 (API 33) or above. You must declare the use of advertising ID in Play Console.`

After struggling for hours to make my Flutter app compile in Android again, I am facing the last few hurdles before being able to publish a long awaited update. Google Api Error: Invalid request - Your app targets Android 13 (API 33) or above. You must declare the use of

flutter

Fixing `In plugin 'com.google.gms.google-services' type 'com.google.gms.googleservices.GoogleServicesTask' field 'intermediateDir' without corresponding getter has been annotated with @OutputDirectory.`

Today I tried to recompile a very old Flutter project. Besides migrating to Android 1.12, I had to upgrade the Kotlin library and Gradle like in https://www.wafrat.com/fixing-module-was-compiled-with-an-incompatible-version-of-kotlin/. But then I got a new error: Some problems were found with the configuration of task ':app:

flutter

Migrating a Flutter app to Material 3

Back in April 2021 at Google I/O, they announced the next iteration of Material Design, called Material You. The new specs were designed to make apps follow the phone's theme colors. In Flutter, the migration has been ongoing, and today with Flutter 3.3, more widgets have been ported

android

Fixing `Google Api Error: Invalid request - This app has no data safety declaration.`

Today I tried to update my Android app, and Fastlane failed to upload a new version with the following error: Google Api Error: Invalid request - This app has no data safety declaration. In the Google Play Console, it showed me these alerts: Clicking the link sent me to a

unity

Publishing a game made in Unity to the Play Store in 2022

Up till now, my game was still on the default platform: Windows/Mac OS. In order to turn it into a mobile phone, I need to switch the platform and support mobile input, then publish it to the Play Store. I've actually done it before in this post, but this

flutter

Upgrading pre 1.12 Android projects based on Kotlin

My old Flutter app has been complaining I need to do this migration for a while. Today I finally decided to do it. flutter/flutterFlutter makes it easy and fast to build beautiful apps for mobile and beyond. - flutter/flutterGitHubflutter Based on the criteria listed in the documentation, I

flutter

My new Flutter project is stuck in assembleGradle

I created a new project by running flutter create .. Then I modified the Android app's package by modifying it in: * android/app/build.gradle * android/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml I also integrated Firestore to it, and added an Android app there, with the new package name. Finally I ran

unity

Publishing a game made in Unity to the Play Store

There is a tutorial on how to publish a game made in Unity to the Play Store on Unity Learn. Here's how it went. Publishing for Android - Unity LearnUnity includes a built-in publishing feature that allows you to publish to various popular platforms in an easy and efficient way.

flutter

Integrating Firebase Auth and Google Sign-in in Flutter Web

I have a Flutter app that uses Firebase Auth with Google Sign-in. I use it in Android and Firebase fine. Today I wanted to run it on web as well. I set up the project to support web (see post). Then I went to the Firebase Console to add the

android

Fixing `Google Api Error: apkNotificationMessageKeyTargetSdkVersionTooLow`

I started receiving this error message when updating my apps to the Play Store: Google Api Error: apkNotificationMessageKeyTargetSdkVersionTooLow: Your app currently targets API level 27 and must target at least API level 28. To fix it, I upgraded the version in build.gradle from: android { compileSdkVersion 28 ... defaultConfig { applicationId "..." minSdkVersion

flutter

Publishing a Flutter app to the Play Store

I'll skip details for the first few steps. Set up an empty app Empty app Test on Android and iOS VM Set up BitBucket repo git init git add . git commit -a -m 'initial commit.' Publish to Play Store as Alpha I followed the Flutter doc on deploying (doc)

android

Notifications

Users can now add, reorder, dismiss reminders. Now how do we remind them of those reminders? With notifications! Design There are guidelines for when and how notifications should be used. There are many details about the structure of notifications: * header area * content area * action area that contains buttons Notifications can

android

ProGuard

ProGuard is an open-source tool to optimize APK's so that they take less space and run slightly faster. It can also help obfsucating code, but only slightly, according to their landing page. After integrating Crashlytics, I enabled ProGuard. Crashlytics was incredibly useful for investigating the resulting crashes I got. Enabling

android

Crash reports with Crashlytics

When releasing to the Play Store, you build a release version of the APK, stripped of all debugging information. So if a crash happens, there is no way to connect to the phone over adb and get system logs. The solution is to use a library that catches those exceptions

android

Enabling Firebase Database for Release builds

After integrating Firebase Database, my alpha builds started failing with an unhelpful "Developer Error". I found this post explaining you should whitelist the SHA1 of both the debug and release version in the Firebase Console. Indeed, I had forgotten to add the one for the release version. So I ran

android

Lists

In this post, I will talk about Lists: how to display a list of items, handle interactions like swipe to dismiss, drag to reorder. ListView First I set out to display a hardcoded list. The guide about List View on Android Developers pages shows a long example with asynchronous loading

android

Pass data between activities

To add a reminder, the user will click a button from the List activity — the activity that shows the current list of reminders. The List activity will open a Reminder setup activity that contains a text box, and in the future some affordance to set the location and possibly day

android

Working with Firebase Realtime Database

In the previous post, we set up authentication. Now that the user is authenticated, we can store and retrieve data from the database specific to that user. Modeling the data The Firebase Database documentation explains how to model data in a way that avoids data duplication. It's called data normalization,

android

Beginning Android – Authentication

Now that the skeleton of the app is made and it is pushed to the Alpha channel, it is time to build real functionality. In the previous post, we discussed how to set up a new Android app, sign it and publish it to the Play Store in a closed

android

Beginning Android

To start my journey learning Android, I chose to make a revolutionary app... A todo app!! Fine, it's actually been made before. You can try out a few dozen ones on the Play Store. Still, none of them satisfied my requirements: * free and ad-free * location reminders * phone notifications * day of