Quick Guide

• Make sure that your project is correctly setup in the ContentManager and works fine on Windows. Ask your programmer or technical person in your company if this is not your expertise (everyone in a team can use the AppBuilder and ContentManager). See below for details!

• Start the AppBuilder and select Android as the target platform.

• Click the Start Build button and report problems back to your programmer (or artist if content is missing for the target platform). If you are the programmer, ask in the Forum for help. Right click on the output to copy it to your bug reporting tool.

• When the build succeeded click Launch to deploy the application on the connected Android device (make sure your Android device is connected, drivers are installed and have debugging enabled, see below for details).

Deployment

Before you start make sure you familiarize yourself with the AppBuilder and ContentManager tools and make sure you can build your application on Windows first!

Also make sure you have a Basic License, without it you cannot do any of the following steps. In order to deploy to an AppStore you also need to be a registered AppStore developer, see the Google Play for Android Developer Signup or other AppStores like the Amazon one. Deploying and testing Android applications locally works fine without an AppStore account. You also do not need to create provisions and certicates for AdHoc testing like for iOS.

Setup

By default your app will be signed with the Android debug certificate, which works fine for testing, but you cannot deploy the application to any Marketplace. More information about how to create your own Android certificate to be able to sign and release your apps is coming soon.

AppBuilder

Select Android as the platform and make sure everything else is correctly setup (you should try building your application on Windows first to make sure everything works just fine).

Currently we are testing the build process and have put several limitations in place. Those will be removed over time.

Click the Start Build button and watch the magic unfold. Since this is still in beta, problems might occur at many levels (settings failing, rules failing, compiler errors and warnings, packaging or signing problems, etc.). Please send us your Launcher logs (just right click on the output and select 'Copy All Messages'). You can either post this in the Forum or write us an email. The Launcher log will not contain your private keys or information, just the general settings and what went wrong. Thanks!

Starting your application

If everything succeeded your app will be added to the list in the App Builder, and you can press 'Start' to bring it to your connected Android device.

Note: Emulators will work too, just start them with AVD Manager.exe, but it is not recommended for games (Android emulators are way too slow).

You will get an error message if this does not work for you (which is mostly "no Android device found"). In this case you need to make sure your Android device is connected and installed and you have a working adb driver (see below).

Currently we do not provide drivers and fallbacks, so you will have to install the Android SDK yourself and make sure your device is connected and works. In case your device is not supported by the Android SDK, you can also use our \Launcher\Android\android_winusb.inf file (overwrite the one in your Android SDK\win-usb-driver directory). Ask in the Forum if you need more help. We will try to improve the Launcher in the future to do more of this automatically.

If you get other Android deployment errors like "error: more than one device and emulator" search on the internet for help. In this case try closing all your emulators (via AVD Manager or in the command line with 'adb kill-server') and make sure only one Android device is currently connected. Also feel free to ask in the Forum for help.

Icons

Android uses the following icon sizes:

• 36x36 pixels for low dpi devices (smaller 320x200 devices)
  
• 48x48 pixels for medium dpi devices (small devices with a bit higher resolutions)
  
• 72x72 pixels for high dpi devices (pretty much the default for most 800x480 devices)
  
• Optional, rarely used: 144x144 pixels for very high dpi devices (smaller hd or full hd devices)
  

Drivers

In case you cannot connect to your Android development device or debugging is not enabled, you probably don't have a running ADB driver. Download the Android SDK and try connecting your device again. If this does not help replace the Android SDK\win-usb-driver\android_winusb.inf file with this one, which supports more devices (more details coming soon, ask in the Forum more more help).