Running Abstra apps natively on Android with Cordova
In this tutorial you will generate a working Android app from an Abstra app.
This is a paid feature. You are required to have an subscription to access it.
This tutorial assumes you have Android Studio working on your machine. If this is not your case, please refer to Google's Guide or Cordova's Guide.
Additionally you need to export to your path the variable
ANDROID_SDK_ROOT. Google also has a guide on how to do that.Also, we will be using Cordova to convert the files. So you need to have
npm to install the Cordova cli:npm install -g cordova
The first step is to get the bundle files for your Abstra app.
Enter the project editor and go to
Settings > Releases and scroll down to the release you want to create an Android app and download the Android / Cordova bundle.
Unzip the file, find the folder
www inside and take note of that
The first step is to create the Cordova project. Go to a terminal and navigate to where the project will be located and type:
cordova create <path> <namespace> <displayname>
After that change into the directory.
The next step is adding the android platform:
cordova platform add android
You can see now that there is a
platforms folder with and android folder insideNow that the project is created, replace the existing
www folder in the root of the project with the one you downloaded previously.
Optionally you can add an icon to your app.
For this you can create a folder called
res in the project root and place an image inside it, in our example logo.png. After that go to the config.xml file and add the following lines inside the android platform<icon src="res/logo.png" />
The final step is to build the project. To do this open a terminal on the root of the project and type
cordova build
This step built your android application on the folder
platforms/android. and also created an installable APK. From here on you have many options: send the APK to your phone install it, open the application with Android Studio or tell Cordova cli to run the app.We will show you using Android Studio and AVD (Android Virtual Device). Open Android Studio then select the AVD tab and launch one (install if needed).
After it is running, click on the play button and it will display the app on the virtual device.
After the build is complete, Cordova exports the APK to
<PROJECT_ROOT>/platforms/android/app/build/outputs/apk/debug/You can copy it and send to your devices, publish it to the Google Play Store, or modify the android project itself, if you need custom access to native resources.
Last modified 1yr ago