6.1 KiB
Kiwix Android
Kiwix is an offline reader for Web content. One of its main purposes is to make Wikipedia available offline. This is done by reading the content of a file in the ZIM format, a highly compressed open format with additional metadata.
This is the version for Android, with support versions ranging from 5 to 13 (like mentioned here).
Important Note: Starting from Android 11, the zim file picker feature
has been restricted in the Play Store variant due to Play Store policies.
This means that users running Android 11 and above will not be able to load
zim files from internal/external storage directly within the app.
This restriction is in place to comply with the Play Store policies.
The Play Store variant of the Kiwix app does not have the
MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission, which is required for scanning storage
and accessing zim files from arbitrary locations.
Therefore, the storage scanning functionality is not available in this variant.
To use the full version of the Kiwix app and access the zim file picker feature,
you can download it directly from the official page. The website allows you to download the full version of the app, which includes the unrestricted file picker feature.
We understand that this restriction may cause inconvenience,
but it is necessary to comply with the Play Store policies and ensure a smooth user experience.
We recommend using the official version of the app available on our website to access the complete set of features.
Kiwix Android is written in Kotlin
Build Instructions
Production releases of the app are built on travis and released automatically
To build this repository alone for development purposes you can simply
import the project into Android Studio and the hard work will be done
for you. Note here that instead of opening the project, you have to import it. If you prefer to build without Android Studio you must first
set up the Android SDK and then run the command: ./gradlew build
from the root directory of the project.
Kiwix-Android is a multi-module project, in 99% of scenarios you will want to build the app module in the debug configuration.
If you are interested in our custom apps they have their own repo kiwix-android-custom that goes into further detail
Libraries Used
- Dagger 2 - A fast dependency injector for Android and Java
- Retrofit - Retrofit turns your REST API into a Java interface
- OkHttp - An HTTP+SPDY client for Android and Java applications
- Butterknife - View "injection" library for Android
- Mockito - Most popular Mocking framework for unit tests written in Java
- RxJava - Reactive Extensions for the JVM – a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences for the Java VM.
- ObjectBox - Reactive NoSQL Databse
- MockK - Kotlin mocking library that allows mocking of final classes by default.
- JUnit5 - The next generation of JUnit
- AssertJ - Fluent assertions for test code
- Fetch - A customizable file download manager library for Android
Contributing
Before contributing be sure to check out the CONTRIBUTION guidelines.
We currently have a series of automated Unit and Integration tests. These can be run locally and are also run when submitting a pull request.
Communication
Available communication channels:
- Web Public Chat channel
- Mailing list
- Slack: #android channel Get an invite
- IRC: #kiwix on irc.freenode.net
For more information, please refer to https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication.