Project URL: https://glitch.com/edit/#!/steel-sparrow
Compiled app direct link: https://steel-sparrow.glitch.me/app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk
What is your project about?
Building an Android app using Gradle.
What does it do?
It’s a “hello world” app with an activity that shows some text.
Give a bit of a description of your project and what is cool about it.
Turns out there’s very few steps to getting an app built. Notably, the Gradle wrapper installs Gradle for you, and the Android Gradle plugin installs the Android SDK packages for you. You need Java, which Glitch happens to have.
But then there’s a few things you need to take care of to make it work on Glitch:
Disk space
It takes ~330 MB of Android SDK stuff and ~270 MB of stuff that Gradle manages. And they’re not Node modules. So I put in some settings to put that stuff in /tmp.
Licenses
The Android SDK has a really protective license, and they want you to accept it before you can download it, which they save that acceptance status in the Android SDK. I make it symlinked to a persistent location in /app so that we don’t lose it if we lose /tmp.
RAM
The build process uses a lot of RAM. But it still seems to work if I lower the Gradle daemon’s heap size limit to 256 MB.