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Developer Environment

We use Android Studio for development which can be downloaded from https://developer.android.com/studio.

Mac OS

The preferred developer environment is Mac OS since this also allows building the iOS variant of our Kotlin Multiplatform codebase. You will need a recent version of Xcode installed along with Xcode command-line tools. See https://developer.apple.com/xcode/resources/ for more information.

Xcode​

Xcode is used mainly just to launch and debug Testapp, all development usually happens in Android Studio. If you're just making a library change in common code it's likely enough to just rely on unit tests or the Android version of TestApp for testing. In other words there is rarely a need to use Xcode at all.

Download Xcode and set Xcode 26.1.1 as the default

sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app   # set default xcode

xcode-select -p   # check whether set succesfully or not

/Applications/Xcode.app   # expected to return

To build TestApp in Xcode you need local Apple signing settings in samples/testapp/iosApp/DeveloperConfig.xcconfig. This file is intentionally gitignored because each developer uses their own Apple Developer Team, bundle ID, and App Group. The project includes a template at samples/testapp/iosApp/DeveloperConfig.xcconfig.template.

cp samples/testapp/iosApp/DeveloperConfig.xcconfig.template samples/testapp/iosApp/DeveloperConfig.xcconfig && \
$EDITOR samples/testapp/iosApp/DeveloperConfig.xcconfig

In the opened editor, set:

DEVELOPMENT_TEAM = YOUR_APPLE_TEAM_ID
LOCAL_BUNDLE_ID = your.registered.testapp.bundle.id
APP_GROUP_ID = group.your.registered.testapp.app.group
SWIFT_TESTAPP_BUNDLE_ID = your.registered.swift.testapp.bundle.id
SWIFT_TESTAPP_APP_GROUP_ID = group.your.registered.swift.testapp.app.group

LOCAL_BUNDLE_ID is used as the TestApp bundle identifier. The DocumentProviderExtension target appends .DocumentProviderExtension to the same value, so register both bundle identifiers in your Apple Developer account. Both targets use APP_GROUP_ID for their App Groups entitlement and for the shared iOS storage container, so the App Group must be enabled for both App IDs.

For example, if LOCAL_BUNDLE_ID is org.example.testapp, the extension bundle identifier is org.example.testapp.DocumentProviderExtension.

SWIFT_TESTAPP_BUNDLE_ID and SWIFT_TESTAPP_APP_GROUP_ID do the same for samples/SwiftTestApp/SwiftTestApp.xcodeproj. The Swift extension target appends .IdentityDocumentProviderExtension, so register both SwiftTestApp bundle identifiers and enable the Swift App Group for both of them.

Then open samples/testapp/iosApp/TestApp.xcodeproj in Xcode, select the TestApp scheme and a target device, and run the app.

Linux and Windows

We also support building on Linux and Windows. In this setup, iOS libraries are not built but non-iOS artifacts for other platforms will work fine.