Versioning Xamarin Android apps

Friday, Sep 26, 2014 3 minute read Tags: xamarin
Hey, thanks for the interest in this post, but just letting you know that it is over 3 years old, so the content in here may not be accurate.

I’m currently working on a Xamarin application with an Android target. We have setup a CI environment using TeamCity as Xamarin describes but what we wanted to do was create an app version accordingly so when we push a CI build you know there’s an update and which build it is from.

So I decided to do some investigation into how Android applications are versioned and what I found is:

  • There is an AndroidManifest.xml
  • This has a versionName attribute in the XML which represents the application version
  • There is a versionCode attribute in the XML which represents an interal application code

Sweet, XML is pretty easy to modify, now how can we modify it so that when we run MSBuild over the Android csproj file?

Conveniently Jason Stangroome had previously given me a MSBuild task for updating the AssemblyInfo with a version number that you provide. Well I’m not needing to update the AssemblyInfo, instead I want to update the AndroidManifest, so I just modified the code to instead of writing a *.cs file to manipulate XML, using C#.

Next challenge - I didn’t want to override the AndroidManifest.xml as that has a problem of file locking (I’m opening it to read the XML so it’s locked) and anyway I don’t want to update it as it’d be useful to see the new file if/when I need in the build output. So that begs the question, how do I get the Xamarin transpiler to understand that there is a different AndroidManifest.xml I want it to use?

Well, if you poke into the Android project’s csproj file you’ll come across this:

<AndroidManifest>Properties\AndroidManifest.xml</AndroidManifest>

Right, so now I have two choices, I can either update that file path or provide a replacement AndroidManifest property in MSBuild. It turns out that the latter was just as easy as the Xamarin Android engine really only cares about the last AndroidManifest that it finds.

Finally there’s the question of “when the do I run my MSBuild task?” and that was a bit tricky to work out. For that I needed to have a look when the AndroidManifest is loaded up so I can run before that target runs. A bit of MSBuild verbose logging later I narrowed it down to _ValidateAndroidPackageProperties, which loads up the manifest, parses it for validity and continues on. With this knowledge we can add a BeforeTargets="_ValidateAndroidPackageProperties" to our target and we’re done.

Conclusion

With a bit of XML manipulation it’s pretty easy to customise the application version of a Xamarin Android application. I’ve created a NuGet package if anyone would like to use it, just:

PM> Install-Package Readify.Xamarin.MSBuild.Android

And pass in the argument:

msbuild MyAndroidApp.csproj /t:SignAndroidPackage /p:AppVersion=1.0.0.1