Team Android Project Template

As a software development company we are starting new projects every few weeks. With every project we create a jira ticket called Project Setup.

We walked through all our Project Setup Jira tickets and calculated the average hours for this kind of task: In average every android project needs about 3.5 hours for a simple setup. On the other hand the project setup is boring and no developer likes that work.

We decided to help developers out and created a simple but helpful template that contains the basic setup for our android projects.

What does the template contain?

1. Our recommended package structure
2. Most used library dependencies
3. Built in flavors for dev, staging, live
4. Basic retrofit setup in a separat module
5. Setup for SplashScreenHelper (https://blog.davidmedenjak.com/android/2017/09/02/splash-screens.html)

Just an empty project would not save a lot developer hours, so we decided to add a template engine to make the project setup more dynamic. After some research we started to use cookiecutter.

A command-line utility that creates projects from cookiecutters (project templates), e.g. creating a Python package project from a Python package project template.

A typical project setup at Team Android @ allaboutapps looks like this:

Cookiecutter checks out the template project from github and starts asking the user for some values:

1. Repository name -> local folder name
2. App name -> Name of the app (fills out in strings.xml)
3. Package Name -> Sets the package name and creates the folder structure
4. Strings Sheet ID -> For our internal Internationalization Tool (there will be an own blog post about that in near future)

et voila -> project setup completed within just a few seconds

The current version of our project setup template is available public on github