Android SDK Troubleshooting

Article
03/14/2024

Important

Visual Studio App Center is scheduled for retirement on March 31, 2025. While you can continue to use Visual Studio App Center until it is fully retired, there are several recommended alternatives that you may consider migrating to.

Learn more about support timelines and alternatives.

What Android permissions are required?

Depending on the services you use, the following permissions are required:

All services: INTERNET, ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE
Distribute: REQUEST_INSTALL_PACKAGES, DOWNLOAD_WITHOUT_NOTIFICATION

Required permissions are automatically merged into your app's manifest by the SDK.

None of these permissions require user approval at runtime, they're all install time permissions.

Analytics data doesn't show up in the portal

Make sure you've integrated the SDK modules correctly.
Make sure correct App Secret is included along with the start() method call. You can copy the exact start() code by opening the app in the portal and navigating to Getting Started page.
If you want to see the logs that get sent to the backend, change the log level to Verbose in your application and the SDK will print logs in the console. Call the API below before you start the SDK.
```
AppCenter.setLogLevel(Log.VERBOSE);
```
```
AppCenter.setLogLevel(Log.VERBOSE)
```
Check the logs say "App Center SDK configured successfully" (in Info log level), then check if you see HTTPS request logs.
Make sure your device is online.
At times, logs might take few minutes to surface in the portal. Wait for some time if that’s the case.
To check if App Center backend received your data, go to the Log flow section in Analytics service. Your events should appear once it's been sent.

Crashes don't show up in the portal

Make sure you've integrated the SDK modules correctly.
Make sure correct App Secret is included along with the start() method call. You can copy the exact start() code by opening the app in the portal and navigating to Getting Started page.
Restart the app after a crash. Our SDK will forward the crash log only after it's restarted.
If you want to see the logs that get sent to the backend, change the log level to Verbose in your application and the SDK will print logs in the console. Call the API below before you start the SDK.
```
AppCenter.setLogLevel(Log.VERBOSE);
```
```
AppCenter.setLogLevel(Log.VERBOSE)
```
Check the logs say "App Center SDK configured successfully" (in Info log level), then check if you see HTTPS request logs.
Make sure your device is online.
At times, logs might take few minutes to surface in the portal. Wait for some time if that’s the case.
If you want to check if the SDK detected the crash on the next app start, you can call the API to check whether the app crashed in the last session and shows an alert. Or you can extend the crash callback to see if it was successfully sent to the server.
To check if App Center backend received the crash, go to the Log flow section in the Analytics service. Your crashes should appear there, once it's been sent.

Distribute and in-app updates are blocking my automated UI tests

If you're running automated UI tests, enabled in-app updates will block your automated UI tests, because they'll try to authenticate against the App Center backend. We recommend to not enable App Center Distribute for your UI tests.

What's the impact of the App Center SDK on my Android app's size?

The App Center SDK is designed to have a minimal impact on your application's installation size.

To illustrate this, we've created an empty java application by using Android Studio's "blank app" template. We build the app in the release configuration and installed the app on a device running Android 7.0.

The tests were run without Proguard enabled.

The numbers below can vary and depend on your build settings, so consider them a rough guide. The SDK's impact to your app will be even lower if you use Proguard.

App Center modules used	Exported APK size	Installation size (as reported by the device)
None (blank app)	1.3 MB	3.43 MB
App Center Analytics	1.4 MB	3.63 MB
App Center Crash	1.4 MB	3.70 MB
App Center Distribute	1.4 MB	3.71 MB
All App Center modules	1.4 MB	3.82 MB

Protect the App Center secret value

The app_secret is an identifier of your app, it's required to know which app the traffic applies to and it can not be used to retrieve or edit existing data. If your app_secret is exposed, the biggest risk is sending bad data to your app, but it won't have an effect on the security of the data.

To retrieve any sensitive data, you'd need to provide an app/user token, which is generated on the client’s side. There's no way to make data on the client's side completely secure.

You can improve your app's security by using an environment variable to inject the app secret into your code. That way, the secret isn't visible in your code.

Migration from jCenter to Maven Central

Due to termination of jCenter support all our assemblies were moved to the Maven Central repository. To use App Center, you need to add mavenCentral() to the repository in your Gradle file like below:

repositories {
   google()
   mavenCentral()
}

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