📱 Home Assistant Companion for Android

Documentation

If you are looking for documentation around the companion applications check out the Home Assistant Companion Documentation. This will provide you instructions on using the applications.

Setup App Development Environment

Download and install Android Studio
Download / clone this repository to a folder on your computer
Create a Firebase project at Firebase Console
Create four Android apps, with following package names
io.homeassistant.companion.android
io.homeassistant.companion.android.debug
io.homeassistant.companion.android.minimal
io.homeassistant.companion.android.minimal.debug
Now download the google-services.json file and put it in the home-assistant-Android/app folder. This file contains the configuration of the whole project (all the four applications).

You can also use the mock services file instead of generating your own The file should contain client IDs for all packages listed above for debugging to work properly. If you do not generate your own file push notification will never work
Start Android Studio, open your source code folder and check if the Gradle build will be successful using Build/Make Module "App". You might have to install the right Android SDK via Tools/SDK Manager first.
Create keystore containing keypair for debug application signing. In Android Studio: Menu/Build/Generate signed APK, then use a button to create new keystore. Remember the passwords and key alias
Set environmental variables used in app/build.gradle.kts:
KEYSTORE_PASSWORD
KEYSTORE_ALIAS
KEYSTORE_ALIAS_PASSWORD
Run the build using gradlew build from command line.
If the build is successful, you can run the app by doing the following: click Run -> Run 'app'
Connect your phone or create a new virtual device following on screen instruction
🎉

If you get stuck while setting up your own environment, you can ask questions in the #devs_mobile_apps channel on Discord.

Push Notifications

If you want to work on push notifications or use a development build with push notifications, please go the server side code HERE and deploy it to your firebase project. Once you have your androidV1 URL to the deployed service, set it in to your ${GRADLE_USER_HOME}/gradle.properties file, e.g.:

homeAssistantAndroidPushUrl=https://mydomain.cloudfunctions.net/androidV1

You can also define the rate limit function URL, e.g.:

homeAssistantAndroidRateLimitUrl=https://mydomain.cloudfunctions.net/checkRateLimits

App Flavors

The Android app has both a full flavor that uses Google Play Services to offer features like location tracking and notifications. There is also a minimal flavor that does not require Google Play Services and can be found in the releases section. The minimal flavor does not have location tracking or notifications.

Testing Dev Releases

We are using Github Actions to perform continuous integration both by unit testing, deploying dev releases to Play Store Beta and final releases to the Play Store when we release. To help test out a specific feature/fixes users can find the APK on the Actions page for each pull request, this debug APK can be installed side-by-side the production or beta builds.

Quality

We are using ktlint as our linter. You can run a check locally on your machine with:

./gradlew ktlintCheck

This commands runs on our CI to check if your PR passes all tests. So we strongly recommend running it before committing.

To run a check with an auto-format:

./gradlew ktlintFormat

Translating

The project currently uses lokalise to translate the application. If you are interested in helping translate go to the link and click start translating!

Generating a release to production

Create a new release with the name and tag in the {MAJOR}.{MINOR}.{PATCH} format
Steal the release notes from the latest beta build
This will cause a tag to be added to the project and the Production Deploy Workflow will handle the rest
Note: Only the first 500 characters of the release notes get set in the Google Play release

corneyl / android