Android - What is continuous integration for mobile and what is the best way to do it in Android?

Question

I have seen some continuous integration providers such as amazon AWS and Jenkins with Firebase.

but which one is the best with easy configurations and for free ?

Answer 1

Continuous Integration, in simple terms, is the practice of having your builds automated by a system; and, you have that system build your app many times a day.

Steps:

• You push a change, or someone pushes a change,
• the build system (jenkins, travis, circle, etc) gets triggered,
• it runs your tests,
• the system builds your APK,
• then, it notifies you if everything works (or if something breaks)

By continuous integrating on a regular basis, you detect errors quicker and you locate them more easily - and since you're doing it multiple times a day you know as soon as possible when something goes wrong.

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Which to choose:

...the best way to do it in Android?

I don't know about the 'best' way - when opting out from paying for it. I'm assuming you're using Android Studio, if so, Firebase would probably be the 'easiest' one to configure and use. This is because Firebase Test Labs comes with continuous integration and Firebase is deeply integrated with Android Studio.

As a bonus, if in the future you decide to change to from Jenkins to Circle CI, you can also use it with Firebase.

If you want another option, don't forget to look at the Github plugin for Jenkins - It doesn't necessarily have to include Firebase but it gives you another option.

Answer 2

Please check out my answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55212214/1748464

I describe how to setup a freen CI for Android based on Bitbucket Pipelines.