Step 3: Android Setup

Android Setup

Prerequisites:

To build with Reader SDK, the following must be true:

• Your application minSdkVersion is API 19 (KitKat 4.4) or higher.
• Your application targetSdkVersion is API 26 (Oreo, 8.0) or lower.
• You are using the Android Gradle Plugin version 3.0.0 or greater. Reader SDK may work with 2.3.0 or greater, but stability is not guaranteed.
• Your application uses support library version 26.0.2 and Google Play Services version 12.0.1. Square cannot guarantee that the SDK will work with different versions of these libraries.
• You are not using Proguard for code optimization. Compressing the Reader SDK binary removes critical bytecode elements and results in runtime errors.

1) Credentials inside gradle.properties

Make sure you retrieved Square credentials (The ones we created on the initial setup wiki page )

If you've worked on Android projects in the past, you probably know that there's a gradle.properties file on ~/.gradle/gradle.properties if you're on OSX (probably also on Linux) and C:\Users\username\.gradle\gradle.properties if you're on Windows.

(There's also a gradle.properties file in the root dir of your Android project, but I prefer adding credentials outside of the project. You can use that one as well).

You need to add the following entry to that gradle.properties file:

SQUARE_REPO_USERNAME=WHATEVER_YOUR_SQUARE_USERNAME_IS
SQUARE_REPO_PASSWORD=WHATEVER_YOUR_SQUARE_PASSWORD_IS

where WHATEVER_YOUR_SQUARE_USERNAME_IS and WHATEVER_YOUR_SQUARE_PASSWORD_IS are the credentials you created in the Initial Setup step.

2) Configure the build dependencies

• Multidex:

Reader SDK and its dependencies contain more than 65k methods, so your build script must enable Multidex. If your minSdkVersion is less than 21, you also need to include the multidex dependency:

android {
  defaultConfig {
    minSdkVersion 19
    targetSdkVersion 26
    multiDexEnabled true // <--
  }
}

dependencies {
  // Add this dependency if your minSdkVersion < 21
  implementation 'com.android.support:multidex:1.0.3'
  // ...
}

Configure the Multidex options:

android {
  // ...
  dexOptions {
    // Ensures incremental builds remain fast
    preDexLibraries true
    // Required to build with Reader SDK
    jumboMode true
    // Required to build with Reader SDK
    keepRuntimeAnnotatedClasses false
  }
  // ...
}

3) Initialise the SDK

Find the MainApplication.java file of your android project, and locate the onCreate method:

It should look something like this:

@Override
  public void onCreate() {
    super.onCreate();
    SoLoader.init(this, /* native exopackage */ false);

    ReaderSdk.initialize(this); // <-- ADD THIS
  }

You'll probably need to include import com.squareup.sdk.reader.ReaderSdk; to make things play well.

Also if you've added Multidex, make sure to also add the following method in that same file:

// We need to override this method because minSdkVersion < 21
    @Override
    protected void attachBaseContext(Context base) {
        super.attachBaseContext(base);
        if (android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT <= Build.VERSION_CODES.KITKAT_WATCH) {
            // Required if minSdkVersion < 21
            // only for KITKAT_WATCH and newer versions
            MultiDex.install(this);
        }
    }

That should get you going, but if you need more info click here