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Can we develop for the Pro with emulators and then validate with a development kit?

Definitely! It’s good to get started by just double checking that your app runs properly in an emulator, and then validating on a DevKit later. Especially if you are just building a merchant-facing app and you just want to test out the screen size.

If you’ve already built a Station 2018, then you’re probably fine; you can just run that in an emulator and see that it works properly.

An emulator is a good test because it will not respond to the platform class that’s been deprecated. It’s not going to ask, “Is Clover Station 2018 true?” or “Is Clover Mini true?” So you can be sure that you’re writing device-agnostic code by testing in the emulator.

When will the Station Pro be released in Canada?

We do not have a date to share at this time. Please stay tuned for future release announcements by subscribing to our mailing list!

What does the adoption rate for the Station Pro look like so far?

We just sent out a press release in the US on Wednesday, February 26. It has not been shipped to any US merchants yet.

There was an early launch weeks ago in the EU; but we can’t say exactly how many devices have gone out so far, it’s still really early to give numbers.

Also – from a positioning perspective, will this take the place of the Station 2018?

In the US, we're going to continue to sell Station 2018 for some merchants who only want a merchant-facing experience. For example, restaurants.

In the US, you put your card on your table, the waiter takes it back, and charges you. This experience is only possible in the US, but there are a lot of restaurants in the US that do this. For these restaurants, Station 2018 will still be a viable option that is sold to them.

For any other type of merchant that was buying two devices and tethering them, we're going to encourage them to buy the Station Pro instead if they want a more seamless POS experience. This is a pretty large segment of the population of merchants here in the US. This is going to be kind of the de facto full POS experience device for all the other countries out there; EU and otherwise.

Can we print custom Android web view using the Clover printer connector?

We have a print job which is the ViewPrintJob and this should work just the same on this device as on any other devices. Station Pro has no real changes to how you do printing compared to any of our other devices, so you shouldn’t have to make any changes at all to your code with regards to printing. As mentioned, Station Pro has got the same exact printhead and paper size as Station 2018.

Without showing the view on Android activity/fragments.

You do not need to display the view in an activity or fragment to print it. You need to ensure that the View has been laid out and measured first, the javadocs for the Builder allude to this and if you invoke the Builder view (View view, int viewWidth) method it will perform the layout and measure for you.

I am a developer and I want to customize the payment screen in Clover Mini. Is it posible?

That's not possible, no.

We use a custom merchant tender for loyalty purposes (not to make a payment). This is for merchants only, and can't be made available to the customer. Are you saying that this won't work anymore?

I spoke incorrectly on the webinar! Merchant-facing tenders are supported on Station Pro! One note about merchant-facing tenders, Station Pro doesn't have payment interfaces on the merchant-facing display so please double check to make sure that any instructions to the employees make sense on Station Pro.

All the statements about customer-facing tenders are still true: the customer-facing display has lifecycle differences, there is no Android keyboard on the customer display. If an app has only a customer-facing tender, we will add a button to the merchant-facing display to let the merchant initiate the process as if the customer chose that tender.

What will be the price of the devkit?

Station Pro DevKits are currently priced at $938.00 and are now available at cloverdevkit.com.

Can you elaborate on the use of "contracts" for data between Clover and the developer's app? I've only ever used the "connector".

You’re definitely going to want to search the Clover Android SDK, for classes with the name “contract” in them. You should also take a look at developer.android.com; this is the standard Android development practice documentation website from Google.

They have a large section on Contracts there. The most famous example being the Contacts contract. If you were writing a regular android app for phone, and you wanted to a list of the user’s contacts, you would be using the Contacts contract. Which provides usage of methods such as query; which allows you to query all of the contacts, some of the contacts.

We have the same pattern that we follow exactly in the Clover Android SDK, where you can query inventory for some items, all items, and you get back a cursor which you iterate over.

This is documented pretty well at developer.android.com; how to use content resolver to query data from a contract. Definitely look at Google’s documentation. We have samples as well in the Clover Android SDK. Look for usages of Contract in there as well.

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The recording of the webinar is available here.