LiveCode 9.6.5 with Android App Bundle for Play Store

We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 9.6.5 RC-1.

This release has all the necessary changes needed to comply with the new submission rules of Google Play Store:

1. Android standalones can now be deployed as app bundles

All you have to do now is check the “Build App Bundle” checkbox in the Android Standalone Settings. This will produce a .aab file, together with the .apk file. You have to submit the .aab file to the Google Play Store:

2. In-app purchases for Google Play Store now use v4 of the Google Billing Library

This change is internal, and does not affect your existing code for in-app purchase

3. The Android engine is now built using version 30 of the Android API

This change has resulted in a number of other changes:

– mobilePickContact now requests READ_CONTACT permission before
executing. No action is required by the developer, other than making sure the “Read Contacts” permission is checked in the Android Standalone Settings

– APKs are now signed with version 2 signature (using apksigner tool). Again, this change is internal, so no further action is required.

– Google Cloud Messaging has been replaced with Firebase Messaging. This means that now the field “Push Sender ID” in the Android Standalone Settings, i.e. this one:

has been replaced by this section:

You have to make sure “Push Notification” is checked, and you have to provide your “google-services.json” file, which can be found in the Firebase Console for this app id. A detailed lesson on this will appear shortly. In short, you have to create a new project here https://console.firebase.google.com/u/0/ (or use your existing project), then create an app within the project, and then you should see the google-services.json download link on the settings page for the app. Just make sure the app id specified in the Firebase Console matches the app id of your Android standalone.

Moreover, this change (API 30) requires an update to your SDK tools:

– Make sure you have installed “Android 11.0 – API 30” in the “SDK Platforms” section of the SDK Manager in Android Studio:

– Make sure the version of your build tools is at least 30.x. It is suggested to install version 30.0.3, since this version is extensively tested:

Moreover, this release contains several important bugfixes and performance improvements.

The most important (and impressive!) performance improvement is when appending to large strings and encoding large arrays on Windows.

For anyone interested in the technical details of this fix, see https://www.mail-archive.com/use-livecode@lists.runrev.com/msg112938.html and https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=23319

If you are just interested in the benchmarks, a script that used to take 8 hours to finish on LiveCode 7+, now it takes less than an hour. Another script that uses arrayEncode and needed almost one minute to finish, now it takes less than half a second.

Another interesting bugfix is that now the browser widget on iOS does send load events in response to user navigation. In addition, now you can have both a Map widget and a Barcode Scanner widget in the same app. Previously this was not possible, due to conflicting dependencies for these two widgets.

You can grab this new release from your my account area or via the auto updater. If you don’t have a LiveCode subscription you can get one here to gain access to the latest releases.