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Compile Retroshare for Android

Introduction

Compiling an application for Android is not as easy as one would imagine, expecially one like RetroShare that has a big codebase and is not well documented. This document is aimed to empower the reader so she can hopefully succed or at least have a significant help in compiling her own RetroShare APK package installable on Android.

Preparing The Environement

First of all setup your Qt for Android development environement following the guide on the Qt for android web site. At this point you should have Android SDK, Android NDK, and Qt for Android working fine, and you should be capable of executing on an Android emulator or on your Android phone Qt for Android examples.

But RetroShare is not as simple to compile as those examples. The good news is that Android NDK ships all the necessary to build a custom toolchain that is suitable to build RetroShare. In order to build the toolchain with needed library RetroShare provides the android-prepare-toolchain.sh script; before you execute it you should define some variables the script cannot determine in an easy and reliable manner by itself in your terminal.

## The path where Android NDK is installed in your system
export ANDROID_NDK_PATH="/opt/android-ndk/"

## The path where your fresh compiled toolchain will be installed, make sure
## the parent exists
export NDK_TOOLCHAIN_PATH="/home/$(whoami)/Development/android-toolchains/retroshare-android/"

## The CPU architecture of the Android device you want to target
export ANDROID_NDK_ARCH="arm"

## The Android API level the Android device you want to target
export ANDROID_PLATFORM_VER="19"

## The number of core that yout host CPU have (just to speed up compilation) set
## it to 1 if unsure
export HOST_NUM_CPU=1

./android-prepare-toolchain.sh

Preparing Qt Creator

Now that your environement is set up you should configure Qt Creator for Android following the official guide. At the end of this step your Qt Creator should recognize the Android compiler and the Qt for Android kit.

Your Kit is now ready to use. Now you can open RetroShare as a Qt Creator project and in the Projects left menu add the newly created kit if not already present, so you can select it on the build type selection button down on the left.

As we use a custom toolchain one more step is needed

_Qt Creator left pane → Projects → Build and Run → Android SOMESTUFF kit → Build Environement → Add

Variable: NATIVE_LIBS_TOOLCHAIN_PATH Value: Same value as NDK_TOOLCHAIN_PATH in Preparing The Environement step

Some of RetroShare modules like retroshare-gui and WebUI are not available on Android so to be able to compile RetroShare without errors you will have to go to

Qt Creator left pane → Projects → Build and Run → Android SOMESTUFF kit → Build Steps → qmake → Additional arguments

and add the following configurations

CONFIG+=no_retroshare_gui CONFIG+=no_retroshare_nogui CONFIG+=no_retroshare_plugins CONFIG+=retroshare_android_service CONFIG+=libresapilocalserver CONFIG+=no_libresapihttpserver CONFIG+=retroshare_qml_app
Warning
 SQLCipher is not supported yet on RetroShare for Android. This poses a major security concern, we are working to fix this ASAP.
Warning
 Some versions of QtCreator try to find the Android SDK in /opt/android/sdk. A workaround to this is to make a symbolic link there pointing to your SDK installation path, like mkdir -p /opt/android/sdk && ln -s /home/user/android-sdk-linux /opt/android/sdk

Quircks

On some Android devices like Huawei ALE-L21 background applications are killed when screen is turned off unless they are in the protected app list. At moment seems apps developers don’t have a way to have the application protected by default, unless the phone vendor decide the app is popular so the user have to enable protection for RetroShare manually on those mobile phones.


To enable enable protection: Android menu → Settings → Privacy & security → Protected apps → RetroShare

Other devices may offer similar features please report them.

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