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It's Apollo's Crib

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Apollo’s Crib for Android

A Smartspacer plugin that puts a vision’s queries on the Android home and lock screen.

It is an Ankyra client, the same as clients/lilygo4.7: it subscribes to a rabbit user’s MQTT topic, keeps the last board it heard on disk, and draws it as Smartspacer Targets. Nothing is polled and no HTTP endpoint is involved – the Pythiae publishes on change and the phone redraws when it does.

What it shows

One Target per source type, added once per query you care about:

Target Source What it draws
Transit gtfs Next departures from a stop, soonest route first, each time marked as realtime or scheduled; a severe or stop-specific alert gets its own card
Bikeshare gbfs Bikes, e-bikes and docks at a station, or loose bikes for an area query
Weather weather Current conditions at a focus
Tides tidal High and low water, in the order the day happens rather than the order the feed sends
Air quality aqi Whatever the monitor measured — nothing is assumed present
Sun and moon ephem Sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, and the phase
Calendar calendar What is coming up, soonest first
Pollen pollen Grass, trees and weeds, worst first, in-season only
Drought drought Drought Monitor coverage, worst category with any of the area in it
GitLab / GitHub gitlab, github Recent CI jobs and runs, pass or fail as the row’s glyph
Cronos, Packages, Constant cronos, packages, const Whatever the publisher sent: these are passthroughs, with no shape to render against

Add the Transit target twice and you get two stops, each choosing its own query when Smartspacer opens the setup screen.

What is not here

apollos-types is the source of truth for the wire format, and this client covers exactly the types it gives a shape to. apollos-crib also publishes icarus, mailbox, treasury, bourse, hass and rideshare, which the crate does not describe — so this cannot claim to read them. They are named at the foot of the board rather than dropped in silence. Adding one means adding it to the crate first.

Setting it up

  1. In Apollo’s Crib, open the Ankyra at cfg/ankyra/<id> and scan the Pair a Client QR with the phone’s camera. It carries the credentials, the topic and the broker address as an apolloscrib://ankyra link, which this app handles – nothing is retyped and there is no scanner in here to break. Check the broker host on that page first: it is where the phone reaches RabbitMQ, which is not necessarily where the app is.

    Failing that, copy the username, password and topic across by hand.

    Either way, leave auto-registration on, or add the client id the app shows you to that Ankyra’s client ids – the broker will refuse the connection otherwise, and Ankyra counts its consumers by that id.

  2. Point a Pythiae at the vision you want and give it that Ankyra.

  3. Install this app, fill in the broker host, port (1883 for the RabbitMQ MQTT plugin) and those credentials, and connect. The screen shows the queries as they arrive.

  4. In Smartspacer: Targets, add, Apollo’s Crib. Pick the query the target shows.

Once there is a working connection the app opens on the board rather than the form: every query in the vision, drawn from the same description its Smartspace card is built from, updating as payloads land. What is on that screen is what a Target added for that query will say. The connection is behind Connection in the corner, and reconnects by itself on launch once it has worked once.

The connection is a foreground service with an ongoing notification. That is what an always-open socket costs on Android; the alternative is polling, which this deliberately does not do.

As a launcher’s feed page

Launchers that implement Google’s “minus one” gesture – the page to the left of the home screen – bind a service exposing ILauncherOverlay and hand it their own window token. feed/FeedOverlayService is that service, so the board is available as the feed page with nothing else installed.

The page is read-only by construction: it draws the same board the app does and offers no way into the settings. A page you can swipe onto by accident should not be able to change anything.

Launchers check the provider’s signature. Lawnchair keeps a list in FeedBridge.initializeWhitelist, keyed by package name and by Signature.hashCode() – an unlisted package is filtered out of the picker before you ever see it. The Connection screen reports this build’s hash for that reason; it differs per keystore, so a debug build’s is not a release build’s.

There is no way past it from a stock build. CustomBridgeInfo.isSigned() is ignoreWhitelist || (signatureHash != -1 && super.isSigned()), and an unlisted package has signatureHash == -1 – so the BuildConfig.DEBUG shortcut inside super.isSigned() never applies to one, and a debug build of the launcher is no help by itself. pref_ignoreFeedWhitelist is the only lever, and it lives in a debug menu whose own enable switch lives inside that debug menu.

So testing means a launcher built with this package listed. One line, next to the entry Neo Feed already has:

whitelist["io.neiam.apolloscrib"] = getSignatureHash(context, "io.neiam.apolloscrib")

getSignatureHash reads the hash off whatever is installed, so it matches a debug build and a release one without either being written down.

Failing a launcher, feed/OverlayHarnessActivity in the debug build does what a launcher does – binds the service, hands over its own window token, drives the scroll. It is how the window attach was got working, and it does not need anybody’s whitelist.

Building

echo "sdk.dir=$ANDROID_HOME" > local.properties
./gradlew :app:assembleDebug :app:testDebugUnitTest

The debug APK is large (~36 MB) because HiveMQ’s MQTT client brings Netty and RxJava. Release builds have optimization switched off in app/build.gradle.kts for now – turning it on wants the SDK keep rule from the Smartspacer wiki.

The wire format

The payload is one JSON object per tick, keyed "<type>-<queryId>":

{
  "gtfs-12": {
    "data": [
      {"route": "14", "route_name": "14", "dest": "Heath St", "dir": "Inbound",
       "mode": "Bus", "times": ["08:00:00"], "color": "#FFC72C"}
    ],
    "query": {"name": "Forest Hills", "meta": {}}
  }
}

A publisher that could not resolve the query sends the bare list instead of the {data, query} wrapper; both are read.

apollos-types is the source of truth for these shapes. The Kotlin types in types/ mirror that crate – when a field is added there, add it here. Unknown fields are ignored rather than fatal, so a newer publisher does not break an older phone.

Adding a source

The seam is deliberate. Weather is in here as the worked example of how small it should be:

  1. A type in types/, mirroring the crate’s struct.
  2. An entry in SourceType.
  3. A SourceRenderer in targets/, which is the only place that decides what the thing looks like.
  4. A four-line ApollosTargetProvider subclass, added to Targets.
  5. A <provider> in the manifest with its own authority.

Everything else – the subscription, the store, staleness, dismissal, binding a target to a query – is already handled and does not need touching.

Look

The palette and typography are lifted from the DMS Android app: the same OKLCh themes (“Her”, “After Dark”, “Forest” …) that the Scribus public routes render under, and B612 for text. The Smartspace targets themselves are drawn by the launcher and are not ours to type.

The board’s glyphs are the ones the web board draws – a bus for a bus, a subway for a subway, a broadcast tower on a time the feed gave and a clock on one the timetable did, a pin on an alert that names your stop. They are not lookalikes: tools/fa_to_vector.py reads the Font Awesome metadata already vendored at clients/lilygo4.7/fontawesome-free-6.2.0-desktop – the same source RoomSanctumWeb.IconHelpers and live_preview.ex name – and emits the same paths as Android drawables. Regenerate with:

python3 tools/fa_to_vector.py

Font Awesome Free icons are CC BY 4.0; the vendored LICENSE.txt covers them.

A Smartspace list row is plain text, so the glyphs are the app’s alone. Rows carry a text form for that surface – 8b 1e 7d rather than 8 1 7, which is not a number of bikes, e-bikes and docks to anybody reading it.

Release builds

CI builds and signs the release APK in a container (clients/android/Dockerfile) and publishes it to the forge’s own F-Droid repository — nothing is installed on the runner, and the same command reproduces it locally:

docker buildx build --target android-export \
  --secret id=keystore,src=./release.jks \
  --secret id=keystore_password,src=./keystore.pass \
  --progress=plain \
  --output type=local,dest=./apk --file clients/android/Dockerfile clients/android

The keystore is a BuildKit secret, so it never reaches a Gradle script, a Gradle cache, or an image layer. Signing is a separate step from Gradle for the same reason.

.forgejo/workflows/android.yml runs that on every push to master and POSTs the APK to /pkg/fdroid/<owner>/<repo>/upload with the job’s own token — there is no publishing credential to create.

versionCode comes from the CI run number and versionName from the commit, so every published build sorts after the last one. Local builds stay at versionCode = 1 / …+dev; they are never published.

Install from the repository by adding it in F-Droid:

<forge>/pkg/fdroid/<owner>/_all?fingerprint=<fingerprint>
curl -fsSL <forge>/pkg/_keys/fdroid/<owner>    # prints the fingerprint

One entry covers every Android app the owner publishes, this one included.

Two different keys, deliberately. The APK key below is what Android checks on every update. The index key is per-owner, lives in the forge’s OpenBao transit engine, and never comes near CI.

The release keystore

Generate it once. Android verifies this certificate on every update, so losing it means every install has to be uninstalled and redone by hand — there is no recovery and no rotation.

keytool -genkeypair -v \
  -keystore release.jks \
  -storetype PKCS12 \
  -alias apolloscrib \
  -keyalg RSA -keysize 4096 \
  -validity 10000 \
  -dname "CN=Apollo's Crib, O=neiam, C=US"

It prompts for the password rather than taking -storepass, which keeps it out of shell history. PKCS12 uses one password for the store and the key, which is what clients/android/Dockerfile assumes — it passes the one password file to --ks-pass and lets the key password default to it.

Back it up before it exists anywhere else

So there is never a window where your laptop holds the only copy:

export BAO_TOKEN=<root token>
E() { kubectl -n openbao exec -i statefulset/openbao -- env BAO_TOKEN="$BAO_TOKEN" "$@"; }

E bao kv put kv/apollos_crib/android \
    keystore="$(base64 -w0 release.jks)" \
    password='<the password>'

kv-v2 versions writes, so a later overwrite doesn’t destroy this one. Recover with:

E bao kv get -field=keystore kv/apollos_crib/android | base64 -d > release.jks

Hand it to CI

On the repository: Settings → Actions → Secrets.

Secret Value
ANDROID_KEYSTORE base64 -w0 release.jks
ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASS the password

The android job skips cleanly while these are unset, so nothing breaks before you get to it. It refuses to fall back to a debug-signed APK: that key is shared by everyone with an SDK, so publishing one would let anyone ship an “update” to it.

CI does not read the keystore out of OpenBao. apksigner has no external-signer hook, so the key has to reach the build container whichever store it comes from, and the runner is outside the cluster while OpenBao has no ingress on purpose. Bao holds the durable copy; the Forgejo secret is the operational one.