Delta Chat Android Client

This is the android client for Delta Chat. For the core library and other common information, please refer to Delta Chat Core Library. For ready-to-use binaries, please go to https://delta.chat .

Build

When checking out deltachat-android, make sure also to check out the subproject deltachat-core:

• When using Git, you can can do this initially by $ git clone --recursive https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android.git or later by git submodule update --init --recursive.

• Alternatively, you can download the deltachat-android zip-file; in this case, also download the deltachat-core zip-file and place its contents to MessengerProj/jni/messenger-backend

There is no need to build the core library itself, deltachat-android just references them.

Then, call ndk-build in the MessengerProj directory to build the C-part and run the project in Android Studio. The project required API 25.

With chance, that's it :) - if not, read on how to setup a proper development environment.

Install Development Environment

1. Some libs required by Android Studio may be missing on 64 bit Linux machines [Source], so for Ubuntu execute
   $ sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386 lib32z1 libbz2-1.0:i386
   and for Fedora execute
   $ sudo yum install zlib.i686 ncurses-libs.i686 bzip2-libs.i686

2. Download Android Studio from https://developer.android.com (android-studio-ide-...-linux.zip) and unpack the archive which contains a single folder called android-studio; move this folder eg. to ~/android-studio

3. To launch Android Studio for the first time, open a terminal, navigate to ~/android-studio/bin and execute studio.sh and use all standard values from the wizard.

4. Android Studio now ask you if you want to download an existing project; choose ~/deltachat-android as created in step 1 (Android Studio starts to build the project, however, there are some steps missing before this will succeed).

5. As Delta Chat uses API 25 for some reasons, go to "Tools / Android / SDK Manager / SDK Platforms" and enable "Nougat 7.1.1 (API 25)" - now the build should succeed - but the app still misses the native part.

6. Download Android NDK from https://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads/ (eg. android-ndk-r15c-linux-x86_64.zip) and unzip the archive which contains a single folder called eg. android-ndk-r15c; move this folder eg. to ~/android-ndk-r15c

7. Export the folder path to your environment as ANDROID_NDK and add it to PATH. You can archive this eg. by adding the following lines to .bashrc
export ANDROID_NDK=/home/bpetersen/android-ndk-r15c
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_NDK

The last two steps may be omitted by using the new Android Studio NDK options, however, thus far, we have not found the time to do so.

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