Android app 1.2.40 ready for alpha testing (with important changes)

(dear fellow devs: I’m still catching up after my move, I’ll catch up on Slack tonight. I’ll be putting out a new device release in the next couple of days)

This is the first android alpha release in a long time (a month?). The location permissions are now much cleaned up (so that they can meet the new more strict Google policies). But since we are currently delisted on Google Play you’ll need to install the APK manually. Once some of you kind folks ‘bless’ this build I’ll push it to the Amazon app store.

Dear alpha testers, to help exercise possible problems please completely uninstall your existing meshtastic before installing this version (so that permissions get reset). There were a lot of changes that needed to happen for this, so it is possible I broke something. Please post in the forum thread with what you find.

Specific changes

  • @Fido contributed Polish translations. Thanks!
  • We now target android SDK 30 (the latest released), but work all the way back to SDK 21 still (android 5.1?)
  • We now are more clear about “location” access is what we need
  • We check every time the app has started
  • We only ask for “background” location permissions if you click the new settings checkbox for “provide location to mesh”. If that checkbox is off we won’t “help out” radios that don’t have their own GPS by providing the phone position (because we can’t access location from our background service in that case)
  • Fix a couple of rare crashes reported via analytics
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Nice. I will try it this weekend. Thanks!

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Installed tested on android 11 with 3 t-beam, update firmware to 1.2.39 using app all working well.

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Did a fresh install, Android 11 with RAK4631 devices on 1.2.39. All working well. I have “Provide location to mesh” disabled because my devices are accurate enough.

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Installed on Android 8.0.0, with Heltec LoRa 32 v2.1, running firmware-heltec-v2.1-1.2.39.06892c4. I was able to send and receive messages without issues.

I didn’t experience any new issues, but on the prior version (the one on the Amazon App store), sending didn’t work on Short-Fast and Medium channels (got crossed out cloud). Also in the prior version, pairing needs to be clicked several times before it works. These issues also occurred on the 1.2.40 alpha.