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GPII for Android

GPII on Android is currently in development release. You can follow the steps below to download, build, and install the necessary components to develop against. For future production releases, everything will be bundled into an apk(s) build.

In development you can keep the gpii javascript on the sd card, and make changes to them there while testing.

This repository contains all the platform-specific code required to run the GPII Personalization Framework on Android.

The following components can be found in the reposoitory:

  • Native modules. These modules are written in Java language and built using Anode. These are required to allow the GPII to access to Android's internals, and they can be found under the platform folder.

    • a11yservices
    • androidSettings
    • audioManager
    • intents
    • persistentconfig

  • In order to use these native modules from Node.js we have included several JavaScript modules. They are under gpii/node_modules folder and are strictly needed to run the GPII on Android. These are:

    • activityManager: Required for launching/stopping applications/services
    • androidSettings: Used for setting conf items on the Android's Settings API
    • audioManager: Used for setting diverse volumes in the Android platform
    • persistentConfiguration: Used for setting conf items on the Android Preferences API

Building, installing and running

We use the grunt task system to perform our build operations. If you don't have grunt installed yet you can do so with:

npm install -g grunt-cli

To fetch our core universal dependencies run:

npm install

Before starting the build, you have to make two things by hand:

  • Tell the system where your Android SDK is located, you can do this by running
export ANDROID_HOME=/path/to/your/android/sdk
  • Pre-configure the build environment. To do that, just go to platform folder and run:
source ./prebuild.sh

After doing that you are able to perform the build by running:

grunt build

Once the build task has finished, you are more than ready to install the GPII Personalization Framework into your device.

The installation can be done in two different ways:

  • Normal installation. By using this method, the GPII won't be able to change some settings or to perform certain operations, such as starting Talkback or changing the speech rate, font size, etc. To perform this installation run:
grunt install
  • Privileged installation. By using this method, the GPII will be installed as a system application so it will have permissions to perform privileged tasks. Note that you need root permissions in your device to perform this installation.
grunt installPrivileged

Note that the install scripts make use of the Android's adb command and also they need some powerful commands in your device in order to perform the installation. Those powerful commands can be provided by some applications that are available in the Google's PlayStore, such as BusyBox or BusyBox(for non-rooted devices). In any case, we recommend the first one.

The GPII can be run either:

  • From the Android User Interface. Search for GpiiActivity and click on Start
  • By using the start task by running:
grunt start

There are some more grunt tasks available, the full list of available tasks is:

  • checkBuildEnv: Check if the build environment is appropriately set up
  • buildApk: Build the APK
  • buildTarGz: Build android-gpii.tar.gz
  • build: Build the entire GPII
  • install: Install the GPII on your Android device
  • uninstall: Remove the GPII from your Android device
  • installPrivileged: Install the GPII as a system application (requires root access)
  • uninstallPrivileged: Remove the GPII from your Android device (privileged installation)
  • clean: Clean the GPII binaries
  • distClean: Clean the full GPII build environment, including build results, downloaded dependencies, universal repo, etc. You can use this in order to start building again from scratch.
  • start: Start the GPII