Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Gracefully supporting multiple Android platform versions in a single release

The Android platform has been aggressively updating since version 1.0 and now we're starting to a see a much more interesting mix of device types, manufacturers, and even platform versions out in the wild. Unfortunately sometimes this can be frustrating for developers wanting to look forward to support new features and conveniences, but to still support devices that are on longer update cycles (like with the G1).

The pattern shown here will deal with multiple platform versions although can easily be applied in other situations. First of all, let's start with a preface about minSdkVersion, targetSdkVersion, and the Eclipse target platform. The *SdkVersion attributes are defined in the manifest <uses-sdk> tag and define the minimum platform version your app can be installed onto (and tested on!), and the highest version that you tested to and were aware of during development. It is important that you test your application on all versions between and including min and target. The Eclipse target platform is the specific version that Eclipse will be compiling against, this is what permits us to compile code that actually does link specifically against the newer platform features. This is usually set the same as your targetSdkVersion.

Now let's consider a practical example of a music player application which needs to implement a service in the foreground state during playback. Prior to API level 5, this was done with the Service.setForeground call, but level 5 and beyond deprecated this method due to widespread abuse. Instead, a new method was introduced (Service.startForeground) which can be used to achieve this affect as well as setting an ongoing notification in the status bar. In many ways this is handy as the notification and foreground state were naturally already tied together, now there's an API combining them. But problems start when you try to test new code using this method on platform versions below 2.0 (API level 5). Specifically, Dalvik will throw a VerifyError when attempting to initialize the class containing the call to startForeground for the first time, even if the call is in a conditional statement. This method does not exist on pre-2.0 devices, and so cannot be included in your code in this way.

A naive approach would be to simply use reflection to test for and execute startForeground, but thankfully Java offers a much more elegant design pattern for just this sort of thing. The basic idea is to create an abstract API that the rest of your application can access which hides the specific implementation of what's being performed, and does so in such a way that prevents the VM from initializing an unsupported class on an older platform. So you might try defining something like this:


public abstract class PlayerNotification {
public static PlayerNotification getInstance() {
if (Integer.parseInt(Build.VERSION.SDK) <= 4)
return PreEclair.Holder.sInstance;
else
return EclairAndBeyond.Holder.sInstance;
}

public abstract void showNotification(Service context, int id, Notification notification);
public abstract void hideNotification(Service context, int id);

private static class PreEclair extends PlayerNotification {
...
}

private static class EclairAndBeyond extends PlayerNotification {
...
}
}


Now your service could be modified to make use of this new abstract API as such:


public MyService extends Service {
private static final int NOTIF_PLAYING = 1;
private final PlayerNotification mNotification =
PlayerNotification.getInstance();

...

public void setForegroundAndShowNotification(Notification n) {
mNotification.showNotification(this, NOTIF_PLAYING, n);
}

public void stopForegroundAndHideNotification() {
mNotification.hideNotification(this, NOTIF_PLAYING);
}
}


Great, this sounds very simple and easy to follow. Let's return to the full implementation of PlayerNotification:


private static class PreEclair extends PlayerNotification {
private static class Holder {
private static final PreEclair sInstance = new PreEclair();
}
private NotificationManager getNotificationManager(Context context) {
return (NotificationManager)context.getSystemService(Context.NOTIFICATION_SERVICE);
}
public void showNotification(Service context, int id, Notification n) {
context.setForeground(true);
getNotificationManager(context).notify(id, n);
}
public void hideNotification(Service context, int id) {
context.setForeground(false);
getNotificationManager(context).cancel(id);
}
}

private static class EclairAndBeyond extends PlayerNotification {
private static class Holder {
private static final EclairAndBeyond sInstance = new EclairAndBeyond();
}
public void showNotification(Service context, int id, Notification n) {
context.startForeground(id, n);
}
public void hideNotification(Service context, int id) {
context.stopForeground(id);
}
}


And that's it as far as code goes! Assuming that you have already updated your AndroidManifest.xml to include the appropriate <uses-sdk> attributes, you're ready to start testing. Use the Android SDK tools to create AVDs for each of the major platform releases from your minimum supported version to your current target and deploy your app on each to make sure you have not made any mistakes.

For further reading about how Java guarantees this approach, read about the initialization on demand holder idiom. This is what allows us to prevent the wrong implementing class from initializing in the VM (and thus causing verification errors).

You can find two working examples of this pattern in my Five app: one using reflection and one matching the explained example

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Building, running, and debugging Android source

There is a lot of confusion surrounding the work flow in the Android source tree, so allow me to simplify:
  1. Follow the initial instructions for downloading the source at:

    http://source.android.com/download

  2. Set up your environment to build the engineering build for the generic device and generic product. This is similar to the SDK, but with a few pieces missing.

    $ source build/envsetup.sh
    $ lunch 1

  3. To build for the first time:

    $ make

    If you have a multi-core system, you can build with make -jN where N is twice the number of cores on your machine. This should speed up the first build considerably.

  4. To launch the emulator from your build:

    $ ./out/host/<your-machine-type>/bin/emulator

    On my system <your-machine-type> is linux-x86.

    NOTE: The emulator knows where to find system and data images as a result of running lunch 1 above. This sets the environment variable ANDROID_PRODUCT_OUT to point to the target directory. For this example, it should be out/target/product/generic/.

  5. If you wish to make changes to the source code, there are handy utilities that have been exposed to your environment by source build/envsetup.sh above. For example, if you modify the Email app and just want to rebuild it:

    $ mmm packages/apps/Email

  6. To see your changes in the emulator you can run:

    $ adb remount
    $ adb sync


    Which will copy the regenerated Email.apk file into the emulator's /system/app folder, triggering the PackageManager to automatically reinstall it.

  7. Or if you change framework resources in frameworks/base/core/res/res/ you could regenerate framework-res.apk with:

    $ mmm frameworks/base/core/res

    Or if you modified even the framework itself you could run:

    $ mmm frameworks/base

    To sync these changes you must restart the running framework and sync, as with this handy sequence:

    $ adb remount
    $ adb shell stop
    $ adb sync
    $ adb shell start

  8. Finally, to debug your changes you can use the DDMS tool to select a process for debug and then attach Eclipse to it. If you have the Eclipse Android Development plugin installed, there is a special DDMS perspective which you can use to choose the process for debug. To attach Eclipse to it, see these instructions:

    http://source.android.com/using-eclipse

    This document also describes how to use Eclipse for development. Any IDE should work with the proper finagling though. Just note that the IDE won't really be an integrated environment: the final output of APKs, system.img, and even the generation of R.java files will have to be done by make!

    A note about the processes in Android:

    • system_process houses all things under frameworks/base/services. This includes the PackageManagerService, StatusBarService, etc. It has many, many threads (one for each service, and then one main UI thread), so be wary when debugging.
    • com.android.acore hosts Launcher (home), Contacts, etc. You can determine the apps/providers that run here by looking for android:process="android.process.acore" in the various AndroidManifest.xml files in packages/.

    Also remember that the "framework" (under frameworks/base/core/java) is not hosted by any one process. It is a library used by most processes, so to debug code there you can usually use a simple demo app that takes advantage of whatever you changed and debug that app's process. A useful trick for setting up your debug connection is to call Debug.waitForDebugger() during some startup part of an application or system service.

UPDATE 2009-07-24: The original ONE_SHOT_MAKEFILE line I gave for rebuilding the framework has been deprecated. mmm frameworks/base is now the recommended way to rebuild the framework code.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Push services: Implementing persistent mobile TCP connections

As a result of my work on IMAP IDLE support in Android's default mail application, I have been experimenting with various strategies for implementing long-lived services and persistent connections that operate efficiently in a variety of circumstances. Several quirks about Android and mobile devices in general arose that could be of value to anyone implementing similar services.

For most protocols, you will need to implement some type of client-initiated keep alive at the application layer. For my purposes with IMAP I simply complied with the RFC and elected to leave IDLE mode then re-enter after 28 minutes of inactivity. On Android, you must use the AlarmManager service to wake the CPU for this task. You might be tempted to use a Handler for timing or even a simple thread with a looped sleep() however it should be noted that unless your application otherwise holds a WakeLock you cannot rely on any timing mechanism other than the AlarmManager. Once the screen goes blank, the CPU may sleep and once it does other timing mechanisms will block until the CPU wakes up again, regardless of any timeout paramters you supply.

After running my test for several days I noticed Android was mysteriously killing processes, claiming that the services implemented in them have "died", then restarting them just a few minutes later. No call to the service's onDestroy method will occur, and even on service restart you will only see a call to onCreate and not onStart. In order to compensate for this you are expected to store your state persistently and check for a discrepency during onCreate and then invoke startService for yourself if necessary. The SharedPreferences system can be handy for this.

Source code for a functional demonstration on this topic can be found at my android-random project page, under the module TestKeepAlive.