Deploy App Hot fixes over the air using Hansel sdk
This week I came across a very useful sdk named Hansel which could be used to provide over the air hot fixes to your application. It must have happened with every mobile developer that they released their app on playstore and unfortunately some crash or some bug has been introduced in it. Now this app is with your current live user base and usually the solution is to release an app update in the market as soon as possible.But an update is like a new release which have to go through your release lifecycle process which might take few days for an app to come to the market.If the issue is very burning or it is crashing at the main usecase of your app , you might loose your customer base. So the integration of this sdk in your app might help you upto some limit to provide that hot fix over the air without making user to update their app.
How to make live your hot fix using Hansel Console
Now the question arises what is Hansel console and why we need it? In our code everything is organised in form of collection of methods.Via this hansel console we could change the existing implementation of any of this method upto some limit.This hansel console have all the method references of our code.Once you integrate this sdk in your app and rebuild your project , it would generate a Hansel crumb file. This file have all the references of your codebase.you need to upload this file on hansel console so that we can use it later to provide a required hot fix. You can also select the app version where you want to provide a specific hotfix. You can test your fixes before making it live by creating test group on their console.Each device have their unique id which gets printed in app hansel logs, you can pick device id from the logs and add those devices in your test group.
Below is the screenshot of hansel console. Reference name is the just the name given to your hot fix.
Once you decide the reference name,app version and function name where you want to make the change. Next step is to find out the category of fix.If your fix do not lie any of the mentioned category , you can select the last option custom hot fix where you can give the new implementation to your method.
If you select the custom hot fix option,Console allows you to change existing implementation of your method.If we can refer the following screenshot we were able to change the argument value and its return value.Although this method have void return type but this is just an example and I have shown how could we do that.In android/ios we can extract any of its views and change there properties.If we know our app is crashing in some method, we could prevent the app crash by encapsulating it inside try catch.There are certain limitations also of this console editor like finally block not supported, for loop not supported ,while-do while loop allowed etc .They have given the documentation of writing code over there console.
After making changes in your method you have the option to make it live and you are done with your fix.
Hansel has lots of other features as well ,here I have focused only on their hot fix functionality. You can explore more on their site https://hansel.io/
For integration in your android/ios app . you can follow this link https://docs.hansel.io/docs . This is the paid service, Once you buy hansel subscription you will get some key credentials which would be required at the time of app integration.
Please do share your feedback/comments if you have any and till then Happy Learning!!.
