buildToolsVersion

[Brad Priddy]

Should this be updated alongside compileSdkVersion? Should this even be specified for using the android library?

[Sean Owen]

Tell me more? what change do you want to see. 

[Brad Priddy]

There wasn't a specific change we were trying to see, we wanted to increment our targetSdkVersion across our project to comply with Google submission requirements but it also made sense to go ahead and increase our compileSdkVersion as well. I'm newer to the project and the previous individual has left the project but the zxing library was the only Android project in our app that had a specified buildToolsVersion. I'm not entirely sure other than cursory googling has indicated using an older version of build tools can lead to problems. I'm just wondering if there's any utility to specifying this now and does it need to increment over time to match compileSdkVersion?

[Sean Owen]

Yeah, the problem is that the current code base won't work with newer versions of the Android SDK, mostly w.r.t. permissions. Older versions don't help. It would be fairly significant work to integrate with the newer permissions model, and I can't do that, and nobody else has. So yeah this app must target older SDK versions -- still works on the newest Android releases though, for now.

[Brad Priddy]

Oh I see, so it could be problematic just changing the targetSdkVersion for that project? We didn't run into any problems when we incremented targetSdkVersion from 28 to 29, we aren't using the library very extensively though, the only intent we use is com.google.zxing.client.android.SCAN, not allowing saved scan history.