KDE Android News (November 2020)

    Since Akademy
a few things have happened regarding bringing our applications to Android.
Here are some of the highlights I’m aware of.

Build System

    FindGradle has been added to
ECM.
This provides the infrastructure for building AAR libraries alongside native libraries, as
described previously
in the context of Android support for KNotification. This is now easily available for all
ECM-based frameworks and applications.

    ECM also received support for application-local AAR libraries and QML plugins.
This means that having such components inside your application repository now results in them
properly bundled in the APK.

    Gabriel fixed build issues on 32bit ARM related to thread usage
we saw in multiple of our external dependencies.

Deployment Infrastructure

    The Docker image
used on our CI and CD systems as well as used by many people for local development has
been updated to Qt 5.15.1. This is crucial as Qt 5.15.0 has had severe issues around content: URL I/O,
which essentially prevented opening of files that weren’t application-internal.

    There has been regular maintenance on several external dependencies we need, such as adjusting to
upstream changes, dealing with build and build system issues, etc. (Discount, Eigen, FreeType,
GStreamer, libxml2, QtZeroConf, etc). This is necessary as we are essentially a distributor when
it comes to Android.

    F-Droid metadata generation for the nightly build repository
had been stuck and is now running again thanks to Ben, so we see up-to-date application information in the F-Droid app again.
Additionally, the application license information is now added there based on the application
AppStream file.

    There’s a proposal
on how to further improve the F-Droid metadata generation so that it becomes reusable
for F-Droid release builds and can contain also screenshots already present in the AppStream file.
Implementation of this is also underway already.

Libraries

    While Qt 5.15.1 fixed the most content: URL related I/O issues, QSaveFile is still broken in this context,
a fix
for 5.15.2 addresses that. This fixes file I/O via KArchive for example.

    There’s a number of hardware abstraction APIs that still has to find their way into frameworks.
Nico has been pushing this for screen server inhibition,
other candidates are network status monitoring
which partly exists in Qt 5 but has been removed for Qt 6, or
screen brightness control.
Volunteers welcome :)

    Another candidate for becoming a framework on its own are the JNI helpers/wrappers in
KAndroidExtras.
Review and feedback would help here, in preparation of moving this to KF5.

Applications

    Kontrast
and Neochat
have been added to the nightly builds.

    Gabriel figured out how we can adjust our application icons so they show up in the proper shapes
depending on the settings on Android, and implemented that
for KDE Itinerary.

    Sharaf is pushing Krita on Android forward, with changes in both the application
and the deployment infrastructure.

Contribute

If you are interested in bringing KDE software to Android, make sure to join the #kde-android channel on Matrix or IRC,
as well as the kde-android mailing list. There is a large amount of users
that we can reach on this platform, so your contribution can have a big impact here!