Android

Signing Apk

Whenever you're using a jarsigner, don't rely on its default setting to sign the apk properly. Check google Sign apk page and use the suggested settings by default.

My original script looked like this:

"%jdkbindir%\jarsigner" -verbose ^
 -keystore bin\LCLDebugBKKey.keystore -keypass 123456 -storepass 123456 ^
 -signedjar bin\%APP_NAME%-unaligned.apk bin\%APP_NAME%-unsigned.apk LCLDebugBKKey

It worked fine on my Android device, but failed on others. What I was missing (per Google's page) is "sigalg" and "digestalg" modifiers:

"%jdkbindir%\jarsigner" -verbose ^
 -sigalg SHA1withRSA ^
 -digestalg SHA1 ^
 -keystore bin\LCLDebugBKKey.keystore -keypass 123456 -storepass 123456 ^
 -signedjar bin\%APP_NAME%-unaligned.apk bin\%APP_NAME%-unsigned.apk LCLDebugBKKey

Debugging such issues could be tricky. Since the only thing that a user sees is a message "App Not Installed". A savvy person will not be able to give you log to see packager error. I had to use one of the online Android test services (testdroid) to get the log

AdMobs

Admobs come with Google Play Services package. However, .jar file is not easy to find in revisions after 30.

The later revisions come with .aar files (specific to Google Android Studio?) under m2repository directory

androidsdk\extras\google\m2repository\com\google\android\gms\play-services-ads

Why do we have to have so many build systems?!