Building Skytube for AAOS - problems with API Keys and crashes on startup

[thaughtless]

Hi there,

I'm trying to build a fork of Skytube for Android Automotive. While it builds and runs fine in the Automotive emulator on Android Studio, it has major issues when deployed as an internal test to the car itself. Basically, irrespective of whatever I try (permissions, etc) it starts and immediately crashes out. I'm not seeing anything come back yet to the console in "crashes and ANRs" to be able to debug it which makes it super difficult to work out what is going on. So I'm trying to hunt for why.

One of the areas of exploration is ensuring that the app itself is setup for what it needs. I noticed this in build.gradle:

// Third party devs: pls be ethical and change the below keys
buildConfigField 'String', 'YOUTUBE_API_KEYS_DEBUG', '""'
buildConfigField 'String[]', 'YOUTUBE_API_KEYS', '{}'

I'm trying to pass in keys in here.

// Third party devs: pls be ethical and change the below keys
buildConfigField 'String', 'YOUTUBE_API_KEYS_DEBUG', '"mykeygeneratedfromgoogleAPIconsole"'
buildConfigField 'String[]', 'YOUTUBE_API_KEYS', '{mykeygeneratedfromgoogleAPIconsole}'

1. Firstly, I'm not sure why I need two keys. Can't I just use the same key?
2. When I do try and pass in a key, the debug line key is accepted when I run the build. No exceptions anyway. But any changes to the second line results in exceptions. With the curly braces it says cannot find symbol variable mykeygeneratedfromgoogleAPIconsole

Again, if I put nothing there it runs fine in the emulator - and I'm not quite sure how bc surely some kind of AuthN is required to the Youtube APIs.

Please someone help me understand what is happening here.

[gzsombor]

You can use the same keys, or you can leave them out (The debug key is used when you build the app with the debug-flavor, the other key is used, when you build in release mode)
The app will work without those keys perfectly. It is only used, if you switch off the NewPipe-backend, to use the official Youtube API. The NewPipe backend is used by default for years now, as the official API was so painful.

[thaughtless]

Got it thanks. Also, I noticed when I'm running the emulator in debug that there are a lot of StrictMode policy violations. I'm wondering if that is what is causing the crashes on startup. Any thoughts on that?

[gzsombor]

Well, good question. As I saw a couple of cases where the code run perfectly fine in emulator but crashed reportedly on real hardware, I cannot exclude. Even though most of the cases were due to missing classes or methods. But in the end, you need to see the logs.