Zebra's MX layer exposes configuration and provisioning capabilities for Zebra devices. Some of these features can be potentially misused by harmful apps so in these cases it is required to specify the signature of the signing certificate used to create the app, this ensures that only the desired app is given the elevated privileges.
This document details the developer impact of moving to Zebra devices running Android 10 (API level 29), and is a follow-up to my previous posts about what’s new in Android Pie,
The sample application to accompany this post is available on Github
Although not common, some customers targeting Zebra Android mobile computers need to be able to scan barcodes when the application is in the background or the mobile computer is in the standby state. Following a question posted on the developer forum we came up with an architecture that appeared to work reliably.
Over the past couple of years I have seen an increasing interest in developing Flutter apps for Zebra Android mobile devices. Until recently I had directed developers to a 3rd party flutter demo that shows how to wrap the EMDK (Zebra's Android scanner SDK). That sample is at https://github.com/acaliaro/flutterZebraEmdk but Zebra's recommended approach is to use DataWedge rather than the EMDK for scanner integration and I noticed a number of people asking about non-Zebra device compatibility, something that is more difficult to achieve with the EMDK.
This article assumes familiarity with Zebra's DataWedge tool as well as the DataWedge profile mechanism. For an overview of DataWedge, please refer to the DataWedge Techdocs page
A very common use case for many Zebra Android developers is using the device scanner across multiple activities in their application, this could cover the following:
Most applications will need to temporarily disable the barcode scanner during their lifecycle. There are two ways to achieve this with DataWedge, both using the ScannerInputPlugin API: Enable / Disable or Resume / Suspend:
Enable / Disable:
Enable / Disable can be called at any time
Last month I wrote about how to switch keyboard layouts on the fly using the Enterprise Keyboard and its API, the use case being that some screens in your app would require different methods of data entry. As I said in my previous post the Enterprise Keyboard is not a general-purpose replacement keyboard and the standard keyboard should be used for standard data or text entry.
Zebra’s range of Android Mobile devices come equipped with Power Precision or Power Precision+ batteries. You can learn more about Power Precision / Power Precision+ from the product page but one advantage of these batteries for the app developer is access to a wealth of additional battery information not available on consumer Android handsets:
Last week James Swinton-Bland, Darryn Campbell & Rabeb Othmani (Bibi) had the privilege to once again represent Zebra at Droidcon London 2019.