Meshtastic-Android/docs/en/developer.md

title, layout, nav_order, has_children

title	layout	nav_order	has_children
Developer Guide	default	2	true

Developer Guide

Technical documentation for contributing to the Meshtastic Android and Desktop app.

---

Before You Open a PR

Things that trip up first-time contributors — check these before requesting review:

• Formatting passes — run ./gradlew spotlessApply to auto-format, then verify with spotlessCheck
• Detekt passes — run ./gradlew detekt and fix all reported issues
• All tests pass — run ./gradlew test allTests (both are needed: test covers Android-only modules, allTests covers KMP)
• Screenshot tests pass — if you touched any Compose UI, run ./gradlew :screenshot-tests:validateDebugScreenshotTest and update reference images if needed
• Protos are an external dependency — protobuf models come from the org.meshtastic:protobufs Maven artifact (pinned in gradle/libs.versions.toml); change protos upstream and bump the version, never edit generated code locally
• Docs updated — if you changed user-visible UI, update the corresponding page under docs/en/user/
• Previews updated — if you changed UI composables, update the corresponding *Previews.kt file and the screenshot-test baselines
• Branch naming — branches must start with feat/, fix/, chore/, docs/, build/, ci/, refactor/, test/, or deps/

---

What's New for Developers

August 2026 — Android Auto removed from all build variants (#6779). feature/car is gone — the module, its Car App Library dependencies, the automotive_app_desc.xml manifest entry and the google flavor's FlavorModule registration.

August 2026 — Testing — CI gained a fourth runner tier: ubuntu-slim (#6674, #6677) now carries the lightweight jobs. It is single-CPU, unprivileged, x64-only and capped at 15 minutes, so anything needing sudo, Docker or a full-history clone stays on ubuntu-24.04-arm. Picking rules are in .github/instructions/ci-workflows.instructions.md.

August 2026 — Flatpak sources are generated inside each architecture's own offline build (#6919) rather than committed, and the flatpak-sources plugin resolves platform dependencies transitively (0.2.x), so the hand-tracked entries are gone.

July 2026 — Test Builds & Obtainium — New page, replacing the root obtainium-test-builds.md. Distributable Obtainium configurations now live in obtainium/ (importable export, one-tap link generator, config-site submission).

July 2026 — Map layer stack (MapLayer.kt, MapLayersManager, GeoJSON/KML import, Site Planner) extracted from the Google flavor into shared androidApp/src/main source (#6148) — F-Droid now renders imported overlays via a new OSMdroid-based renderer, so both flavors compile one implementation.

July 2026 — Persistence — Local Mesh Discovery sessions and cached msh.to device links now persist to Room (DiscoverySessionEntity, DiscoveryPresetResultEntity, DiscoveredNodeEntity, DeviceLinkEntity).

June 2026 — Architecture / Codebase — Protos migrated from the core/proto git submodule to the org.meshtastic:protobufs Maven artifact; there is no longer a local proto module to build or sync.

June 2026 — AIDL/IMeshService removed (#5586). The mesh service is now in-process only, driven entirely through RadioController — no cross-process binder, no aidl stubs.

June 2026 — Testing — Split the screenshot pipeline: the new generate-only :docs-screenshots module holds doc-framed compositions, while :screenshot-tests stays the CI visual-regression gate — so reframing a doc image no longer churns a test baseline.