Native app vs. hybrid app: How to choose a solution that meets your business needs

Automation helps with all the mundane and error-prone tasks that developers need to do on a daily basis. It also saves a lot of time. For automating iOS beta deployment, a very popular tool is Fastlane. The tools automate entire iOS  CI/CD pipelines and allow us to keep an iOS infrastructure as code. Today I will share my observations and tips regarding setting up fastlane for iOS project.

Setting up Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source automation server, but you can use fastlane on your local machine too. However, a separate build server can certainly help you create a more streamlined process.

The Jenkins installation process is pretty straightforward, so I will not be going into details here. But there are some quirks that we should take into consideration.

To elevate the problem with detached HEAD, we should provide Branch Specifier with „origin” e.g. „origin/master” and choose the option Check out to specific local branch with branch name including  ** . For more details, see the Jenkins' help.

All the tool commands should be put in the Execute shell phase.

Setting up Fastlane

Fastlane is used to simplify deployment of iOS and Android apps. It is well documented and its community always tries to help in case of any bugs etc. We can install it using Homebrew or RubyGems and I personally recommend using the latter. I stumbled upon some problems during installation of fastlane plugins after using `brew` to install fastlane.

To integrate the tool with our project, we should open its directory in terminal and type:

 fastlane init

It will start a very intuitive creator that guides us through the process of setting up fastlane for our project. After this process is finished, we have configured it. Now we can customize and create new lanes.
Fastlane lanes are written in Ruby. Even if you are unfamiliar with this programming language, learning the basics that are needed to configure it shouldn't take too long. There is also a version of fastlane that supports Swift. However, it is still in beta.

Fastlane tips

The tool provides a few ways of handling code signing e.g. „cert” and „sigh” or „match”. However, if you plan to use fastlane mainly on CI/CD server you can rely on automatic code by signing in Xcode and installing the certificates manually on that machine. In that case you don't need to use any of those actions in your lanes.

If you prefer to move your Fastfile (fastlane configuration file) to a different directory than the project's directory, you will have to provide manually paths to the actions. In that case it is better to use absolutes paths since when you just use  ../ prefix you may end up in a different directory that you would expect.

Error block  error do |lane, exception| is very useful for error notifications. For example, you can post message to Slack when lane executed by the CI server failed.

 Android Automotive OS is getting more recognition as automotive companies are looking to provide their customers with a more tailored experience. Here we share our guide to building the first app for AAOS.

Before you start,  read our first article about AAOS and get to know our review to be aware of what to expect. Let’s try making a simple  Hello World app for android automotive. To get an IDE, go to  Android Studio Preview | Android Developers and get a canary build:

In the next step, prepare SDK, check and download the Automotive system image in SDK manager. You can get any from api32, Android 9, or Android 10, but I do not recommend the newest one as it is very laggy and crashes a lot right now. There are also Volvo and Polestar images.

For those you need to add links to SDK Update Sites:

 https://developer.volvocars.com/sdk/volvo-sys-img.xml

 https://developer.polestar.com/sdk/polestar2-sys-img.xml

Start a new project, go to  File> New Project and choose  automotive with  no activity

A nice and clean project should be created, without any classes: Go to  build.gradle and add the car app library into dependencies, refresh the project to make it get

our new dependency:

implementation "androidx.car.app:app-automotive:1.2.0-rc01"

Let's write some code, first our screen class. Name it as you want and make it extend Screen class from  android.car.app package and make it implement required methods:

public class GrapeAppScreen extends Screen {



  public GrapeAppScreen(@NonNull CarContext carContext) {

      super(carContext);

  }



  @NonNull

  @Override

  public Template onGetTemplate() {

      Row row = new Row.Builder()

.setTitle("Thats our Grape App!").build();



      return new PaneTemplate.Builder(

              new Pane.Builder()

                      .addRow(row)

                      .build()

      ).setHeaderAction(Action.APP_ICON).build();

  }

}

That should create a simple screen with our icon and title, now create another class extending  CarAppService from the same package and as well make it implement the required methods. From  createHostValidator() method return a static one that allows all hostnames for the purpose of this tutorial and return brand new session with our screen in  onCreateSession() , pass  CarContext using  Session class  getCarContext() method:

public class GrapeAppService extends CarAppService {



  public GrapeAppService() {}



  @NonNull

  @Override

  public HostValidator createHostValidator() {

      return HostValidator.ALLOW_ALL_HOSTS_VALIDATOR;

  }



  @NonNull

@Override

public Session onCreateSession() {

  return new Session() {

      @Override

      @NonNull

      public Screen onCreateScreen(@Nullable Intent intent) {

          return new GrapeAppScreen(getCarContext());

      }

  };

}



}

Next, move to  AndroidManifest and add various features inside the main manifest tag:

<uses-feature

  android:name="android.hardware.type.automotive"

  android:required="true" />

<uses-feature

  android:name="android.software.car.templates_host"

  android:required="true" />

<uses-feature

  android:name="android.hardware.wifi"

  android:required="false" />

<uses-feature

  android:name="android.hardware.screen.portrait"

  android:required="false" />

<uses-feature

  android:name="android.hardware.screen.landscape"

  android:required="false" />

Inside the Application tag add our service and activity, don’t forget  minCarApiLevel as lack of this will throw an exception on app start:

<application

  android:allowBackup="true"

  android:appCategory="audio"

  android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"

  android:label="@string/app_name"

  android:roundIcon="@mipmap/ic_launcher_round"

  android:supportsRtl="true"

  android:theme="@style/Theme.GrapeApplication">



<meta-data android:name="androidx.car.app.minCarApiLevel"

  android:value="1"

/>



<service

      android:name="com.grapeup.grapeapplication.GrapeAppService"

      android:exported="true">

<intent-filter>

<action android:name="androidx.car.app.CarAppService" />

</intent-filter>

</service>



<activity

      android:name="androidx.car.app.activity.CarAppActivity"

      android:exported="true"

      android:label="GrapeApp Starter"

      android:launchMode="singleTask"

      android:theme="@android:style/Theme.DeviceDefault.NoActionBar">



<intent-filter>

<action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />

<category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />

</intent-filter>

<meta-data

          android:name="distractionOptimized"

          android:value="true" />

</activity>

</application>

Now we can upload our application to the device, verify that you have an automotive emulator created, use automotive configuration, and hit run. The app is run in Google Automotive App Host, so if it is your first application on this device, it may require you to get to the play store and get it.

That’s how it looks:

The last thing, we’ll add a navigation button that will pop a  Toast . Modify  onGetTemplate() in  Screen class, add  Action and  ActionStrip :

Action action = new Action.Builder()

      .setOnClickListener(

              () -> CarToast.makeText(getCarContext(), "Hello!", CarToast.LENGTH_SHORT).show())

      .setTitle("Say hi!")

      .build();



ActionStrip actionStrip = new

Add it to  PaneTemplate:

return new PaneTemplate.Builder(

      new Pane.Builder()

              .addRow(row)

              .build()

)       .setActionStrip(actionStrip)

      .setHeaderAction(Action.APP_ICON)

      .build();

That’s our HelloWorld app:

Now you have the HelloWorld example app up and running using Car App Library. It takes care of displaying and arranging everything on the screen for us. The only responsibility is to add screens and actions we would like to have(and a bit of configuration). Check the Car app library to explore more of what can be done with it, play around with creating your app, and definitely check our blog soon for more AAOS app creation content.