Here at blk.io we have been working hard to ensure that Android developers working with Ethereum have the latest and greatest of web3j’s features at their disposal, and this has its challenges. Whether it’s developing new features or fixing bugs once needs to be cognizant of writing code that will work on all supported platforms.
The last published android-specific build of web3j was web3j-3.3.1-android, and since then we’ve had numerous builds containing some great features and critical fixes that our community was itching to use on Android.
Most of the recent web3j contributions heavily used Java 8’s features and constructs, such as Streams and CompletableFutures, but we still wanted to support devices running Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich, api level 15) so using Java 8 was not going to be easy.
Enter Gitcoin, who generously supported us with a bounty to make the necessary changes to bring the latest version of web3j to android 4.0.3.
Thanks to Sergey for the hard work in delivering this excellent piece of work. As a result we have made a snapshot available for those wishing to preview the latest web3j on android.
What do I need to do?
Update your dependency of web3j to 4.1.0-android-SNAPSHOT and voila; you can also find the files here.
Note that web3j-android has come along way since the last release, so you will have to make some changes to your code as the API has changed. Take a look at our prior posts for context:
https://medium.com/blk-io/web3j-4-0-0-preview-is-available-just-in-time-for-devcon-4-b4f37067a541
https://medium.com/blk-io/web3j-4-0-0-ga-is-available-82a2675d8f11
What’s next?
We will be looking to publish a release of 4.1.x with some other fixes and features soon, but in the meantime, we’d love to hear from you regarding your web3j Android adventures, get in touch!
The blk.io team.
