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DONN FELKER

Lessons Learned From the Software Industry

Android Bootstrap and Android Studio

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Myself and a slew of other folks have been working on getting Android Bootstrap moved over to use Gradle so we can get it working correctly with Android Studio. Also during this process we’re moving the app over to use some of the Google libraries. Changes include:

  • Move from Maven to Gradle*
  • Using AppCompat for the ActionBar
  • Navigation Drawer implementation*
  • Using Picasso to load remote images
  • Reorganize file structure to match Gradle recommendations
  • Various library upgrades

I’m happy to say we’re at an alpha stage with this. If you go to alpha.androidbootstrap.com you can generate a project that has support for all of the items above. You should be able to open the generated project in Android Studio and start coding away.

I also spoke with Jake and a few other people over twitter recently about how it might be a good idea to change the minSdkVersion to 15 when this is released. The reason for this is because if you’re going to create a new project you’re probably going to target v15 or above anyway. Sure, you may miss out on ~30% of the available market (as of Nov 2013), but developing and supporting those old devices (pre v15) for a NEW project just doesn’t make sense most of the time. The maintenance and support costs outweigh the market position you might gain. Plus, if you did support v10+ (or whatever) you’d be losing that market and have a ton of tech debt to manage from that point forward. Why not start with v15? If that becomes the case I’ll probably remove AppCompat and use the built in Android Action Bar.

* The build.gradle is not fully complete yet, we need to implement build variants and a few other things and get the integration tests working. I’m also not happy with how the navigation drawer is implemented  It works, but it is not implemented well. It was simply a port from sliding-menu to the new library to get it work. We will be moving it to a pure fragment based implementation very shortly. 

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Comments

  1. kenyee says

    Still nice to have an example of how to use AppCompat though…and it’s still useful to generate a framework that is compatible w/ older devices in case you’re porting an app that used to work with those older devices like I’m doing…

  2. Shakti Malik says

    Thanks a lot.
    I want to use this new library in my project but I am not sure how will i merge your changes with my code as you develop this library.

  3. Svebor says

    Is there any howto from a to z for us not using mac, maven, intelij or whateve you were using while making it but howto for Android Studio? I have been looking for this for ages and haven’t found any info on how to implement it in existing project like you explain in your video..

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