---
id: android-native
title: Adding Flipper to Android apps with Gradle
sidebar_label: Android with Gradle
---
import useBaseUrl from '@docusaurus/useBaseUrl';
import Link from '@docusaurus/Link';

To set up Flipper for Android, you need to add the neccessary dependencies to your
app, initialize the Flipper client and enable the plugins you want to use. Optionally,
you can hook up the diagnostics Activity to help you troubleshoot connection issues.

## Dependencies

Flipper is distributed via Maven Central. Add the dependencies to your `build.gradle` file.
You should also explicitly depend on [`soloader`](https://github.com/facebook/soloader)
instead of relying on transitive dependency resolution which is getting deprecated
with Gradle 5.

We provide a "no-op" implementation of some oft-used Flipper interfaces you can
use to make it easier to strip Flipper from your release builds.

```groovy
repositories {
  mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper:0.123.0'
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.soloader:soloader:0.10.1'

  releaseImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper-noop:0.123.0'
}
```

<div class="warning">

Please note that our `flipper-noop` package provides a limited subset of the
APIs provided by the `flipper` package and does not provide any plugin stubs.
It is recommended that you keep all Flipper instantiation code in a separate
build variant to ensure it doesn't accidentally make it into your production
builds. Check out [the sample
app](https://github.com/facebook/flipper/tree/main/android/sample/src) to
see how to organise your Flipper initialization into debug and release
variants.

Alternatively, have a look at the third-party
[flipper-android-no-op](https://github.com/theGlenn/flipper-android-no-op)
repository, which provides empty implementations for several Flipper plugins.

</div>

## Application Setup

Now you can initialize Flipper in your Application's `onCreate` method, which involves
initializing SoLoader (for loading the C++ part of Flipper) and starting a `FlipperClient`.

```java
import com.facebook.flipper.android.AndroidFlipperClient;
import com.facebook.flipper.android.utils.FlipperUtils;
import com.facebook.flipper.core.FlipperClient;
import com.facebook.flipper.plugins.inspector.DescriptorMapping;
import com.facebook.flipper.plugins.inspector.InspectorFlipperPlugin;


public class MyApplication extends Application {

  @Override
  public void onCreate() {
    super.onCreate();
    SoLoader.init(this, false);

    if (BuildConfig.DEBUG && FlipperUtils.shouldEnableFlipper(this)) {
      final FlipperClient client = AndroidFlipperClient.getInstance(this);
      client.addPlugin(new InspectorFlipperPlugin(this, DescriptorMapping.withDefaults()));
      client.start();
    }
  }
}
```

## Diagnostics

It's recommended that you add the following activity to the manifest, which can help diagnose integration issues and other problems:

```xml
<activity android:name="com.facebook.flipper.android.diagnostics.FlipperDiagnosticActivity"
        android:exported="true"/>
```

## Android Snapshots

Feeling adventurous? We publish Android snapshot releases directly off of `main`.

You can get the latest version by adding the Maven Snapshot repository to your sources
and pointing to the most recent `-SNAPSHOT` version.

```groovy
repositories {
  maven { url 'https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/' }
}

dependencies {
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper:0.123.1-SNAPSHOT'
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.soloader:soloader:0.10.1'

  releaseImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper-noop:0.123.1-SNAPSHOT'
}
```

## Enabling plugins

Finally, you need to add plugins to your Flipper client. Above, we have only added the Layout Inspector plugin to get you started. See <Link to={useBaseUrl("/docs/setup/plugins/network")}>Network Plugin</Link> and <Link to={useBaseUrl("/docs/setup/layout-plugin")}>Layout Inspector Plugin</Link> for information on how to add them, and also enable Litho or ComponentKit support. You can check the sample apps in the [GitHub repo](https://github.com/facebook/flipper) for examples of integrating other plugins.

## Having trouble?

See the <Link to={useBaseUrl("/docs/troubleshooting")}>troubleshooting page</Link> for help with known problems.
