How can I create a sticker pack for Android like I have in iOS for iMessage?

Question

In Xcode (for iOS devices), I can simply click on a button that says "new sticker pack app," and (magic!) there it is, no coding necessary. I just add images to it and upload it to the app store. Super simple!

Android now allows for stickers as well through Gboard.

• Create stickers for Gboard on Google Play

• How To Create Your Own Sticker Pack for Google Keyboard (Demo)

However, as far as I can tell, you already need to have a sticker app in order to follow any of the directions I can find for adding it to Gboard. But how do you create a sticker app in the first place?

Take this wonderful line in both the above links: "To kick things off, you'll need to add the Firebase App Indexing library."

"Add?" Add to what?

I found this and downloaded it, thinking it might be a template or something. But I couldn't get it to run at all in Android Studio.

• GboardCustomSticker

It does have these awesome instructions: "Get Google-service.json from your firebase project."

"Firebase project?" What firebase project?

How do I create a sticker pack app to which I can "add" the Firebase App Indexing library so that the sticker app will show up on Gboard? It's so easy in iOS!

Maybe Firebase has sticker pack templates or something, I thought. But they don't seem to as far as I can tell.

• Firebase

FWIW, I'm not opposed to writing code if necessary. It would just be nice to have some idea what code needs to be written! And where to put it!

A link to a start-with-nothing to finish-with-everything-and-upload-to-app-store tutorial would be absolutely fantastic. The only thing I really don't need help with at this point is making the PNGs!

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

From what I understand of the links you posted, you add the Firebase App Indexing API to your app. You can do this easiest in Android Studio by going to Tools->Firebase, which will open a drawer to the right. In this drawer click on App Indexing and follow the instructions.

Basically it adds the Firebase dependencies to your build gradle file and populates the google-service.json which is just a config file with some constants and strings for firebase to work.

Gradle dependency:

implementation 'com.google.firebase:firebase-appindexing:16.0.1'

I recommend using the Android Studio assistant. Once this is done your app is now a Firebase project, as it has its own project in the Firebase web app, which is basically a fancy name for an app that is connected with some Google libraries that do cool stuff.

You then can use the library as shown in the docs to index your stickers into the Playstore at first install or update of your app.

new Indexable.Builder("Sticker")
   .setName("Bye")
   // add url for sticker asset 
   .setImage("http://www.snoopysticker.com?id=1234")
   // see: Support links to your app content section
   .setUrl("http://sticker/canonical/image/bye")
   // Set the accessibility label for the sticker.
   .setDescription("A sticker for Bye")
   // Add search keywords.
   .put("keywords", "bye", "snoopy", "see ya", "good bye")
   .put("isPartOf",
        new Indexable.Builder("StickerPack")
          .setName("Snoopy Pack")
          .build())
   .build())};