At Bright Inventions we use TeamCity as a continuous integration server. Apart from building, running tests and uploading artifacts we sometimes use it to quickly distribute an android application to clients and test team. However we found using TeamCity UI on a mobile device isn’t as pleasing as it could be. That’s why we usually recommend downloading updates through a dedicated application such as TeamCity Downloader.
While TeamCity Downloader is really easy to use I found it lacks a couple of features I need. First of all I would like to be able to use multiple TeamCity servers at once. Moreover it would be nice to see commit messages related to particular build to streamline change communication.
Lazy Apk - a simple apk downloader
Since I wanted to test some of new APIs available in Lollipop I thought it would be a good idea to try them out in an application that could actually be useful. That’s why I’ve build another artifacts downloader - Lazy Apk.
The tool allows you to configure multiple TeamCity build servers:
As I mentioned the commit messages are visible next to each build:
Downloaded APKs are stored inside android “Downloads” so there is no need to pull the same package twice:
Source available on Github
Lazy Apk source code is available on github. I’ve tried couple of different techniques to extract code from Activity classes - I’m not yet sure if I like the results though…
This article is cross-posted with my company blog