MeshChatX/android

MeshChatX Android (Chaquopy)

Native APK with embedded Python (meshchatx/) and a WebView UI.

Prerequisites

• Android SDK (ANDROID_HOME / ANDROID_SDK_ROOT) with cmdline-tools and a matching NDK (see android/app/build.gradle for the pinned NDK version used in CI).
• JDK 17 (Temurin or compatible).
• Chaquopy vendor wheels under android/vendor/ (build locally with bash scripts/build-android-wheels-local.sh from repo root, or use CI artifacts). That script builds native recipes under android/chaquopy-recipes/ and also vendors pure-Python wheels such as bleak and httpx[http2] (for bundled RNS-over-HTTP / HTTPInterface).

Lint and static analysis

• Android Lint (Java, Kotlin, manifests, resources): from android/, run ./gradlew --no-daemon :app:lintDebug. HTML report: app/build/reports/lint-results-debug.html. CI runs this in the Android workflow when tests run.
• SAST (GitHub CodeQL): the repository workflow includes a java-kotlin matrix entry (see .github/workflows/security.yml) for GitHub’s security analysis on default branches and PRs.

Launcher shortcuts, language

• App shortcuts (long-press the launcher icon): open Messages (meshchatx://app/messages) and Call (meshchatx://app/call). The WebView handles these in App.vue via handleProtocolLink.
• Per-app language (Android 13+): android:localeConfig points to res/xml/locales_config.xml. Add translated values-xx/strings.xml for Android notification/shortcut strings; the in-app language still comes from MeshChatX server config.

Build

From repo root:

bash scripts/build-android-wheels-local.sh
cd android
./gradlew --no-daemon :app:assembleDebug :app:assembleRelease

There is a single application variant (no product flavors). Gradle syncs the entire meshchatx/ tree into app/src/main/python/meshchatx/ (including public/repository-server-bundled for the in-app repository server), and syncs vendored vendor/lxmfy/lxmfy into app/src/main/python/lxmfy/ (required for bots; not installed via Chaquopy pip) plus vendor/rns_filesync/rns_filesync into app/src/main/python/rns_filesync/ (required for FileSync). The fetchRepositoryBundledWheels task runs before sync when bundled wheels are missing; if repo root dist/reticulum_meshchatx-*.whl exists (e.g. from python -m build --wheel -o dist .), that wheel is preferred over PyPI for the bundled set.

Native ABIs (universal APK)

Release and debug artifacts are universal APKs only: one APK per build type, embedding the native libraries for each ABI selected at build time.

• -PmeshchatxAbis=... or MESHCHATX_ABIS: comma-separated list from arm64-v8a, x86_64, armeabi-v7a (default: all three). This controls which .so variants are merged into the single universal APK, not separate per-ABI store listings.

Outputs

Each build produces:

• Debug: app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk
• Release (unsigned until you sign): app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release-unsigned.apk

Signing release APKs

See repo root scripts/sign-android-apks.sh (default glob targets outputs/apk/release/).

Troubleshooting

1. Confirm android/vendor/ contains required .whl files from the wheel build script.
2. Codec2 (voice messages, LXST Codec2 profiles): wheels must include pycodec2/libcodec2.so beside pycodec2.so. The wheel build script repacks automatically; for an existing android/vendor/ tree run python3 scripts/repack-android-pycodec2-wheels.py. Gradle also runs this before sync and copies libcodec2.so into jniLibs per ABI.
3. Run ./gradlew :app:assembleDebug with --stacktrace if Python sync or Chaquopy pip steps fail.
4. Re-run ./gradlew :app:assembleDebug after changing meshchatx/ assets; sync runs on merge Python sources tasks.

See ../LICENSE for full text and notices.