Meshtastic-Android/docs/en/developer.md

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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 — Documentation Style — New page: the house style guide for docs/en/ prose, with rule IDs, a project word list, and the reasoning behind each convention.

August 2026 — Map tile sources are one shared catalogue in feature/map (MapTileCatalogue, RasterTileSpec), so both flavors draw the same raster base maps and overlays from one definition.

August 2026 — Both maps draw an imported feature's own icon and drape a KMZ GroundOverlay image at its LatLonBox (rotation included) — MapLibre via an ImageSource quad, Google via GroundOverlayOptions (#3786).

August 2026 — Offline map-pack downloads are gated on offlineMapsSupported, since the MapLibre offline API compiles on Desktop but silently downloads nothing there.

August 2026 — New module feature/map-maplibre: the F-Droid flavor and Desktop now render every map surface (main map, node track, traceroute, discovery, inline mini-map) through maplibre-compose from one multiplatform module, and osmdroid is gone. The shared rules both renderers must agree on live in feature/map policy classes.

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.