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Android backend for egui

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# egui-android

This is an opinionated library and framework for creating [egui] apps for Android, that acts as an alternative backend to [eframe]. The goal is to make it relatively easy to write Android apps using pure Rust and egui.

**This project is considered highly experimental! The demo should run, but not everything you would expect out of a production-ready Android app may be working yet.**

While eframe _can_ be used on Android, it does currently have certain limitations and missing features, primarily caused by winit which eframe always uses.

This backend instead removes winit as the middleman and instead provides glue from Android to egui directly. This offers improved user experience for at least the following:

- Better handling of sleep and resume without panics
- Automatic activity save and resume state
- Native-feeling soft keyboard support

While winit's Android support will likely continue to improve, much of the value that winit provides doesn't apply as much on mobile devices, and will always have to add another abstraction layer on top of the underlying platform. Ultimately winit will always be at a disadvantage as far as tight platform integration.

The downside is that this crate is specific to egui, and cannot be used with any other UI toolkit. This only works because egui already has its own backend-agnostic API, for which it provides a good deal of information to allow the backend to integrate well with it.

## Building

Managing Android SDKs in a reproducible way can be annoying, especially when not using Android Studio. This project attempts to avoid all use of Gradle, which means we have to do some things from scratch.

First prerequisite is [mise](https://mise.jdx.dev) which is a tool that helps manage reproducible developer environments. This tool will install all other required dependencies for you.

Once installed, you can build an APK for the provided demo app with:

```sh
mise run demo:build
```

Note that the first time you run a mise command, mise will need to download dependencies for the development environment including the Android developer SDK, which is quite large and may take a while to install, so be patient.

You can even run the demo app in an Android emulator once compiled. To do this, first run the Android emulator in the background by running:

```sh
mise run emulator:start
```

This should open an emulated Android device in a window after a while. Then while it is open, you can run

```sh
mise run demo:run
```

This will automatically deploy the demo app APK to the emulated device, and open the app. The app's log output will be shown in the terminal while the task is running.

You can stop the emulator with:

```sh
mise run emulator:stop
```

## Project goals and future

My goal for this project is to make it relatively easy to make mobile apps using egui and pure Rust code. For cross platform support, the idea is to make the majority of your app a shared crate that just uses egui without any platform-specific implementation. Then, for each target platform, you can make another crate that pulls in the bulk of the app as a dependency, and compiles the platform-specific details. This is that platform-specific crate for targeting Android.

I already publish and maintain a pure-Rust app using egui to the Google Play Store, but it is using winit as the underlying layer which has caused me a couple problems. My plan is to make this crate good enough that I can replace the winit layer with this crate, without users noticing any regressions, and at the same time fixing a few reported bugs.

Once this crate is working well enough to ship real apps with, I'd like to turn my focus to making a similar `egui-ios` crate for targeting iOS devices. I do not feel the need to do a similar binding for desktop operating systems -- winit already fits the desktop paradigm well, and you can simply use the official `eframe` crate as your platform-specific implementation for targeting desktop applications.

## License

This project's source code and documentation is licensed under the MIT license. See the [LICENSE](LICENSE) file for details.

[eframe]: https://crates.io/crates/eframe
[egui]: https://crates.io/crates/eframe

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