Getting Buffer Publish ready for Android 10

Learn about the things we did to prepare our app for the Android 10 release. This post explains getting Buffer publish ready for Android 10.

Android 10 is officially here! On 3rd September it began rolling out for pixel devices, so we wanted to be sure that our app was ready to serve our users who would have Android 10 installed on their device. When these OS updates come around, as developers we sometimes don’t know how many changes we’re going to need to make to our applications. When Android Marshmallow was released, permissions changes were quite a big thing for many applications. As we move our way through versions up to Android Pie we’ve also seen restrictions in various forms for permissions as a whole, along with other changes to restrictions on the size of data passed through intents and various media focused changes. When it comes to Android 10, there are a collection of changes (as outlined on the developer site) that could potentially affect your app – these changes also include some enhancements that are also available in this latest release.

Whilst we we haven’t had to make too many changes for our app, in this post we’ll share the things we did to prepare our app for the Android 10 release and how we adapted some of the new features into our application.

Updating versions

Other than updating the targetSdkVersion of your application to 29, you’re going to want to update a couple of android related dependencies that will improve the release of your application for Android 10.

To begin with, you may have seen that Android 10 features the ability to enable gesture navigation – this removes the software buttons at the bottom of the device, allowing the user to rely on gestural navigation to move through applications. Whilst this is something that is not enabled by default, we wanted to make sure that our app behaved as expected when this gestural mode was enabled. In order to get the best experience with gestural navigation you’ll want to update to the latest version of the androidx drawlayout dependency. Yes, this is an alpha version but without this there may be some UX difficulties when it comes to certain interactions. For example, on 1.1.0-alpha02 we experienced some oddities when trying to open the navigation drawer within our app. For this reason you should be sure to use at least 1.1.0-alpha03 if you are targeting sdk 29.

If you’re using the androidx appcompat dependency, then updating this to 1.1.0-Rc01 might be required if you are planning on making use of the sharing improvements, with backwards compatibility, for Android 10. When it comes to the changes we made to sharing improvements, this update was required to make use of the ShortcutInfoCompat and ShortcutManagerCompat classes.

Gestural Navigation

This was a big change coming for Android 10 – whilst an optional setting that can be toggled from the system settings, gestural navigation allows the user to navigate through the system, apps and backstack via the user of swipe gestures. With the aim to replace the software buttons located at the bottom of the device, this gives us more screen estate to play with as well as give the option to provide a more streamlined navigation experience.

After enabling gestural navigation through Settings > Gestures > System Navigation you’ll be able to try gestural navigation for yourself. Whilst at first this may just seem like a new way to navigate through your device, it can actually have a big impact on the user experience of applications. Because we can now swipe horizontally from either side of the screen, this can interfere with components within your application.

Now, this does really depend on the application in question, as some application may not be affected by this change – it really depends on the components that make up your project. Before updating to alpha03 of the navigation drawer dependency, within alpha02 we experienced an issue where the navigation drawer would not open correctly. As it was, this would not be releasable as that’s where our users changes their currently selected account, which is a core part of our application. If you’re unaware of gestural navigation or missed out on testing this, it’s worth double checking that you’re on the latest version of this library and that the navigation drawer in your app behaves correctly.

Alongside the navigation drawer, anything component that may usually be intercepted within the bounds of this back-swipe gesture should be tested to ensure that there is no interference here. For example, if we had an edge-to-edge swipe-able view component, this could potentially be affected by gestural navigation. Whilst we didn’t have anything else that was affected by the gestural navigation changes, this might not be the same for your application. Check out this blog post for more information on how to overcome these kind of issues.

Scoped Storage

As the versions of Android have progressed, we’ve often seen changes being made to permissions and/or how we access files on the device. This is an important topic and we can understand these changes being made as our users content needs to be both contained and available by other applications when requested. Scoped Storage has been an interesting topic, right back to when the original beta releases and documentation came out for Android 10. There are more information on these changes here, but to summarise how media access now looks across the system:

Compared to the original specification for scoped storage, what’s in place now for Android 10 aimed to provide a way that was both accessible for user and developers. For Publish, we needed to make a couple of changes as we were seeing some errors when trying to handle media from certain locations on the device. In some places we were previously making use of the file path to access files on the device from other apps, and on Android 10 this can cause issues as we may not have permission to access the file. If we are looking to retrieve a file then we should now be accessing it using the content resolver – on Android 10 there is now a function available called openFile() to do this.

val fileDescriptor = context.contentResolver.openFile(mediaUri, "r", null)

Once we have the ParcelFileDescriptor from this call we can use that to access the file, without running into any permission related issues (provided that we have been granted read access to the users storage where required). This method for access files will also need to be taken into account when trying to read Exif data for files – so when trying to create a new instance of an ExifInterface this will need to take the file retrieve from the media store using the above approach. The same rules will apply for any approaches involved when trying to deal with media – your best bet is to read up on the storage related changes for Android 10 and see how they might affect your app.

Settings Panels

This feature allows users to access key settings for the device (related to connectivity and audio) so that they can easily change common settings without leaving the context of your application. This functionality is only available on Android 10, so is not backward compatible with older versions of the Android OS. A lot of applications make use of networking features, so the connectivity side of things is something that these apps will be able to (and should really) make use of.

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