Android Workgroup Meeting 21-May-2025 notes

Development Android
1

Android WG Meeting 21-May-2025

Attendees: @marcprux, @finagolfin, @etcwilde, @mishal_shah, @compnerd

  • Project Board: the "Swift on Android" project board has only a few things on it, partly due to Finagolfin unable to add issues from some other repositories to it. Mishal says to refer any issues that need adding to him and we will be able to update the project board. One TODO that needs to be added is documentation for the swift.org web site.
  • Green CI: After Finagolfin resolved the final failing tests , the community Android CI is green! Behold the "passing" badges. The next step is to promote the Android CI from the community build server to a full member of the official CI suite.
  • SDK Bundle: the PR for building the Android SDK (swift-docker/pull/467, swift/issues/80788) is ready for review. It is being exercised continuously at the swift-android-sdk-build repository actions against 6.1, nightly 6.2, and development, and artifactbundles can be downloaded from the actions page from each run for analysis and testing.
  • Post-install process: As the Swift Android SDK relies on an external Android NDK being available on the system, the swift sdk install processes will need to be followed-up by manually running a script to link the NDK into the SDK's installation. We hope to eventually be able to accomplish this with a simple swift sdk configure command, but a variety of enhancements and bug fixes (such as swift/pull/79621 and swift-package-manager/issues/8584) will be needed before this can be improved, and shouldn't be a gating factor on releasing the bundle.
  • Android on the Swift Package Index: @daveverwer and @finestructure are starting to add Android builds to the swift package index process and will start surfacing them once they have reworked the platforms table for the packages. They are currently using the 6.1 SDK with the intention of updating to an official 6.2 SDK once something is available on swift.org. Once that is available, @marcprux will deprecate the https://swift-everywhere.org Android build status page (cf. SwiftPackageIndex-Server/discussions/3461).
  • CMake and mixed Swift/C projects: Discussion of CMake bug where linker flags are now being passed directly to the Swift compiler since 3.30, and they weren't before.
  • ICU and apk size: Discussed externalizing the ICU data file "icudt76l.dat" from lib_FoundationICU.so so that it is not included multiple times in the .apk (once per architecture). More review needed for the swift-foundation-icu/pull/53, and we shouldn't block a 6.2 release on the issue, since it can be an improvement for future releases.
  • Docker: We are going to look into combining the Dockerfile for both the SDK bundle creation and the CI testing.
  • Android Workgroup Draft Charter: The Platform Steering Group and the Core Team have been discussing the Android workgroup draft charter. It is likely that some small changes will be requested, such as removing the membership cap. Future policy decisions around Android support (e.g., which API and NDK versions to build against, which architectures to support) will be made by the PSG with advisement from the Android Workgroup.
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