timy-messenger/android

Timy Android

Setting up Firebase

Create a project on the Firebase console here

• To add Firebase to your app, click on the android icon or click the gear icon to go to project settings to find the android icon.

• Register your application by filing up the form with the package name (applicationId) and the app nickname if you like.

Find Your package name which is generally the applicationId in your app-level build.gradle file

• Don't just download the google-service.json just yet, click next throughout and also skip the step where you need to verify the configuration.

• Go back to project settings, here we need to generate a second configuration file. The reason for this is that the first file we generated is for a release build. Now we need to create one for a debug build. These applications are differentiated by the application id to which while debugging, a suffix .debug is appended to the applicationId.

• Under your apps, add another app to the project. Click the android icon again on the dialog that pops up. Register your app with the package name with .debug at the end.

• Download the google-service.json file that is generated for you. Find it and move it inside the folder android/app/ of the project. The firebase sdk is already added to the project.

• Open and view the contents of the file, check that there are 2 entries of client_info with the 2 package names, one for debug and one for release.

• On the fourth step of registration, run the app to verify the configuration via the Firebase console.

Distribution

To build this application for distribution, provide a file key.jks containing the signing keys, and the key.properties with the following content:

storePassword=.....
keyPassword=.....
keyAlias=key
storeFile=../key.jks

Where you set the storePassword and the keyPassword. You can also change the alias.

You will need to uncomment the section signingConfigs in the app/build.gradle.

And change the signingConfig signingConfigs.debug to signingConfig signingConfigs.release.

You can also provide this files from your CI instead of including this in the project.