It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here. I am currently in the process of updating the AbPK for Android app.

When I originally wrote the app I targeted an older version of Android, assuming Google would maintain backwards compatibility. But, silly me, they don’t think like that. Update or get deleted is their motto, which is exactly what happened to my apps on Google’s play store.

According to them, the state-of-the-art method for developing apps for Android is to use Google’s own tool, Android studio. So I downloaded, installed and fired up Android studio “Koala”. Then clicked Import and selected the original project manifest. The “Importing” dialog appeared and then ran and ran and ran. I let it go on for 48 hours before giving up. So much for Android studio. What a disappointment, the splash screen with the koala icon is so cute.

Since the original version was written in the Eclipse IDE, I thought to give it a go, why not? So I went to download the latest version of Eclipse and, guess what, it doesn’t have a pre-built Android dev package anymore.

Fortunately I did find this post from 2022 that details how to install the Android SDK and the necessary dev tools into the Eclipse Java package:

How to Install and Setup Eclipse IDE For Android App Development

Several errors later I discovered that Eclipse uses a different folder structure, e.g., it looks for the Emulator under tools instead of its own folder, etc. So I ended up duplicating the 35 SDK that was installed with Android Studio. I mean, who cares about hard disk space anymore? After several more starts and stops the project eventually loaded, albeit with 3 fatal errors and 105 warnings. All the errors and warnings stem from deprecated methods no longer available in the most recent Android SDK. To say this will take some time to fix all this is an understatement.

Even if all 108 problems are fixable, I’m not optimistic the code will compile into an app that is acceptable to the google gods. Wish me luck.