Ferrous-Solitaire/docs/android/PLAYABILITY_TODO.md

Android Playability TODO

Started: 2026-05-10 — first hardware screenshot of v0.22.3 APK running on a real device showed the desktop HUD projected onto a 360 dp portrait viewport with no mobile adaptation. This list tracks the work needed to make the APK genuinely playable, not just "boots without crashing."

Context: v0.22.3 (signed release APK) builds and launches. JNI bridges (clipboard, keystore) compile but are untested on hardware. The work below is UI/UX port work — no architectural rewrites required.

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Reading from the v0.22.3 screenshot

Region	Observation
Top ~5 %	System bar (clock, signal, battery) overlapped by game HUD — no safe-area inset
HUD text row	Score:0 Pause Esc Help A Modes [] New_Game N Moves:0 0:08 all overlapping — desktop layout crammed into 360 dp
Keyboard hints	Esc, A, [], N shown next to buttons — meaningless on touch
Foundations row	Leftmost foundation (♥) clipped left; rightmost tableau column (♠ 4) clipped right
Card backs	Face-down cards render as solid red squares, not back-art texture
Vertical use	Cards occupy top ~30 % only; bottom 70 % empty black — no portrait-aware layout
Bottom edge	No accommodation for Android gesture / home-indicator area

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P0 — Blocking playability

• Safe-area insets (top + bottom). Closed 2026-05-10 by b9aa262. SafeAreaInsets resource + SafeAreaInsetsPlugin query WindowInsets.getInsets(systemBars()) via JNI on Android; HUD anchors carry SafeAreaAnchoredTop { base_top } and the change-detection fix-up system re-applies base_top + insets.top whenever the resource updates. Bottom inset is captured but not yet consumed (waits for bottom-anchored UI).
• Mobile HUD layout. Closed 2026-05-10. Both the left HUD column and the right action button row are now capped at max_width: 50 % and the button row + tier-row child Nodes carry flex_wrap: Wrap. On a 360 dp viewport the 6-button row breaks to multiple lines (right-justified) and the tier rows wrap individually instead of overflowing into the action column. On desktop (≥ 1280 px) the 50 % cap is wider than any natural row width so the existing single-line layout is unchanged.
• Card-back asset not rendering. Closed 2026-05-10 by fcc7337. AssetPlugin::file_path = "../assets" was set unconditionally to fix the desktop cargo run -p solitaire_app CWD relativity, but on Android cargo-apk packages the same directory into the APK at assets/ and Bevy's AndroidAssetReader is already rooted there — prepending ../ walked the reader out of the APK assets root and every load failed silently. The face-down branch then fell through to the card_back_colour(0) solid-red brick fallback. Gated the override behind #[cfg(not(target_os = "android"))].
• Viewport overflow. Closed 2026-05-10. compute_layout was clamping the input window up to MIN_WINDOW = 800 × 600, so a 360 dp phone got laid out as if it were 800-wide and the outer piles fell outside the actual viewport. Lowered the floor to 320 × 400 (below the smallest reasonable phone) so real Android resolutions flow through without clamping, while keeping a sentinel to guard against degenerate / startup-zero windows. New regression test phone_portrait_layout_fits_horizontally asserts all 13 piles fit a 360 × 800 viewport.

P1 — Touch UX

• Suppress keyboard-hint labels on Android. Closed 2026-05-10. spawn_action_button now nulls the hotkey argument on Android via a #[cfg(target_os = "android")] rebind, so the U / Esc / F1 / N chips next to the action row labels disappear on touch builds. Remaining hint sites swept in P3 — see full-keyboard-hint-sweep entry below.
• Thumb-sized hit targets. Closed 2026-05-10. Action button Node carries min_width: Val::Px(48.0), min_height: Val::Px(48.0) — meets Material's 48 dp baseline on touch and is a no-op for buttons whose content already exceeds 48 px in either axis. Applied universally rather than cfg-gated since Material's guideline applies to all input modes. Cards, pile markers, modal close buttons not yet audited — track as P3 if they fall below threshold on hardware.
• Portrait-first card spacing. Closed 2026-05-11. compute_layout now derives an adaptive tableau_fan_frac from the available vertical space below the tableau row. On height-limited (desktop) windows the formula returns ≈ 0.25 and the clamp keeps the existing behaviour. On width-limited (portrait phone) windows — where card size is constrained by the 9-column horizontal packing — the fan fraction expands to fill the viewport (≈ 0.84 at 360 × 800 dp). tableau_facedown_fan_frac scales proportionally. Both values live in the Layout struct; card_plugin::card_positions and input_plugin::card_position / pile_drop_rect read from the struct so rendering and hit-testing stay in sync across viewport sizes.
• Double-tap auto-move visible feedback. Closed 2026-05-11. On a recognised double-tap (priority 1 single-card or priority 2 stack move), the moved card(s) receive a 0.35 s lime flash (STATE_SUCCESS tint + HintHighlight { remaining: 0.35 }) before the move request is written. The flash persists through the card animation and is cleaned up by the existing tick_hint_highlight system. Hardware trigger-verification remains a manual step — connect AVD or device and confirm two rapid TouchPhase::Ended events within 0.5 s produce the lime flash.

P2 — Polish

• Drag responsiveness on touch. Closed 2026-05-11. Two code-side improvements shipped; final feel confirmation still needs hardware:
  1. start_drag (mouse path) now bails out when a touch is just-pressed (Touches::iter_just_pressed()), ensuring touch_start_drag always owns the drag state on touch-screen devices — including Bevy/Winit versions that simulate MouseButton::Left from the primary touch.
  2. Mobile drag commit threshold lowered 10 px → 8 px, matching Android's ViewConfiguration.getScaledTouchSlop() spec. Smaller threshold → smaller snap-on-commit and faster perceived response. Remaining: connect AVD or device and verify drag feels responsive with no stutter; tune threshold further if needed.
• Long-press menu. Closed 2026-05-11. New system radial_open_on_long_press in radial_menu.rs counts up while a touch is held (drag.active_touch_id.is_some() && !drag.committed) and opens RightClickRadialState::Active after 0.5 s — the same state the right-click path uses. Existing radial infrastructure then handles everything:
  • radial_track_cursor extended to fall back to the first active touch when no cursor position is available, so sliding the held finger moves the hover ring.
  • radial_handle_release_or_cancel extended to confirm/cancel on Touches::iter_just_released() in addition to right-mouse release.
  • handle_double_tap skips when the radial is active (guards a narrow edge case where the finger lifts at exactly the same frame the 0.5 s threshold fires). Hardware verification needed: confirm the 0.5 s hold feel, verify sliding to a destination and lifting confirms the move.
• HUD typography. Closed 2026-05-11. New system update_hud_typography fires on WindowResized and adjusts Tier-1 font sizes based on viewport width. Below 480 logical px: Score TYPE_HEADLINE (26) → TYPE_BODY_LG (18), Moves/Timer TYPE_BODY_LG (18) → TYPE_CAPTION (11), so all three items fit in the 180 dp HUD column on a 360 dp phone. At ≥ 480 px the original sizes are restored — desktop/tablet layout unchanged. add_message::<WindowResized>() added defensively to HudPlugin so the system works under MinimalPlugins in tests.
• Orientation lock. Closed 2026-05-11. Added [package.metadata.android.application.activity] section to solitaire_app/Cargo.toml with orientation = "portrait". cargo-apk/ndk-build maps this to android:screenOrientation="portrait" in the generated AndroidManifest.xml. Remove (or add a landscape layout) before enabling auto-rotate.

P3 — Asset density

• Density-aware card scaling. Closed 2026-05-11 — no code change required. WindowResized fires with logical pixels; sprites are sized in world units (1 world unit = 1 logical pixel); Bevy's renderer maps logical → physical via scale_factor internally. On a 360 dp 3×-DPI phone, cards are 40 logical dp = 120 physical px. The 256 × 384 px card textures are downscaled to fit (256 → 120 px) — quality is fine. Upscaling only occurs if card_width × scale_factor > 256, i.e. a tablet with a logical width > 765 dp at 3× DPI — no current target device falls in that range. Revisit if the game ships on large-screen high-DPI tablets.
• App-icon density buckets. Closed 2026-05-11. Created solitaire_app/res/mipmap-{mdpi,hdpi,xhdpi,xxhdpi,xxxhdpi}/ic_launcher.png from the existing assets/icon/ PNGs (48→mdpi, 64→hdpi, 128→xhdpi, 256→xxhdpi+xxxhdpi). Added resources = "res" to [package.metadata.android] so aapt packages the mipmap tree into the APK, and icon = "@mipmap/ic_launcher" to [package.metadata.android.application] so the launcher references it.
• Full keyboard-hint sweep. Closed 2026-05-11. Extended the P1 suppression to cover all remaining hint sites:
  • ui_modal.rs::spawn_modal_button — single #[cfg(target_os = "android")] let hotkey = None; line covers every modal button across onboarding, pause, confirm-new-game, game-over, restore-prompt, play-by-seed, home, help, profile, stats, leaderboard, settings, and achievement modals simultaneously.
  • home_plugin.rs — mode-card hotkey chips (N/C/Z/X/T) gated with #[cfg(not(target_os = "android"))] on the chip container.
  • replay_overlay.rs — [SPACE]/[ESC]/[←→] footer hint text gated with #[cfg(not(target_os = "android"))]; mode-indicator text kept.
  • help_plugin.rs — keyboard chip containers in the controls reference table gated with #[cfg(not(target_os = "android"))]; description text kept (still useful on touch).

P4 — Stability / runtime

• B0004 ECS hierarchy warnings. Investigated 2026-05-11 — no fix required. B0004 fires via Bevy's validate_parent_has_component<C> hook when a child entity has UI component C (e.g. Node, InheritedVisibility) but its parent doesn't yet. In Bevy 0.18, .despawn() is recursive (docs: "When a parent is despawned, all children will also be despawned"), so all .despawn() calls in the engine are safe. The warnings seen on the Pixel 7 AVD during startup are a component-propagation timing artifact — UI children reach the hook before the parent's inherited components finish initialising — not a gameplay defect. despawn_related::<Children>() in card_plugin.rs is explicit child-only teardown (parent kept alive) and is correct. No gameplay bugs attributed to these warnings over 2+ min AVD runtime.

• AVD functional tests for JNI bridges. Closed 2026-05-11. Pixel 7 AVD (Android 14, x86_64) confirmed running; APK installs and runs stable. Key findings:

  Keystore JNI — verified working. Forced SolitaireServerClient by writing a solitaire_server settings file, triggering android_keystore::load_access_token() at startup via start_pull. Logcat confirmed: sync pull failed: authentication error: token not found for user avd_test — the JNI call to AndroidKeyStore completed, correctly returned NotFound, and the sync system handled the error gracefully. No panic, no crash from the JNI layer.

  Clipboard JNI — verified working. Added a temporary KEYCODE_C test hook (avd_clipboard_test system) to stats_plugin.rs, rebuilt the APK, pressed C on the AVD. Logcat confirmed: [avd_clipboard_test] clipboard JNI OK — ClipboardManager.setPrimaryClip() succeeded on Android 14. Test hook reverted; production clipboard path still requires Interaction::Pressed on the share button with a non-null share_url (won game + sync server).

  Side-finding fixed: reqwest/hyper-util's GaiResolver calls tokio::runtime::Handle::current() which panics with "no reactor running" when driven by Bevy's AsyncComputeTaskPool (async-executor, not Tokio). Fixed in sync_plugin.rs: all three AsyncComputeTaskPool::spawn sites and the push_on_exit fallback now wrap HTTP futures in a temporary tokio::runtime::Builder::new_current_thread().enable_all() runtime.

  Touch input limitation: adb shell input tap does not deliver touch events to Bevy/winit on Android 14 + android-activity 0.6.1 in headless AVD mode. Keyboard events (KEYCODE_*) work normally.

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Notes / decisions

• This list is screenshot-driven; expect more items to surface once P0 unblocks actually moving cards on hardware.
• The pattern across all the bugs is "no one ran the relevant code path on Android yet." The hard work — Bevy 0.18 on Android, JNI bridges, signed CI builds — is done. What's left is a coordinated pass of #[cfg(target_os = "android")] gates plus making LayoutResource query the real surface size.
• Where possible, prefer responsive layout (query window size) over branching #[cfg] blocks. Branches are fine for input methods (touch vs. mouse) but not for screen geometry — a foldable or desktop window of equivalent size should look the same.