Thank you for your response!
Yes, I'm paranoid enough that I did it offline. Doing it on an offline linux machine that would otherwise use a package manager has its added difficulties. I ended up just downloading the source for all the additional packages I needed onto a thumb drive and built them as that was easier than the alternative.
After a couple hours of no luck trying to figure out how to do it, and before finding this posting, I'd considered just performing an on-chain move of all wallet funds. But Schildbach's app doesn't offer the ability to select the exact transaction fee or another way to move the entire contents of a wallet and that was my goal.
Additionally, the Schildbach app had recently crashed in such a way that it would immediately crash every subsequent time when starting. This made it completely unusable. So I would've needed to uninstall, reinstall, and I'm guessing recover from an encrypted backup. This crash was the final straw for me for the Schildbach app.
For context: in my quest to remove Google from my life I've been using MicroG for LineageOS on my phone. I don't use the Google Play Store anymore, and have been relying on F-Droid. There's been some ongoing issue with getting the Schildbach app from F-Droid. The short version is that Schildbach blames F-Droid and posters to the F-Droid forum say there's "reproducability issues". It feels like both sides are pointing fingers at each other and refusing to fix the issue, but the end result is that it hasn't been updated there since 2019.
I'd been fine with that for a while, but a few months ago I decided I wanted to start storing BTC offline on paper wallets. Imagine my frustration when, as a test, I tried to sweep a paper wallet back into the app and it gave me an error. After searching for a solution and finding nothing I looked at the code for the error message, and when trying to correlate that with commit messages my best guess was the version of the app I was using used an outdated API to get some blockchain information needed for the sweep operation. I could be misremembering the details, but I tried it multiple times over a couple weeks with the same failure each time. Whatever the cause was, this was an issue that had been fixed for many months.
While many later versions of the app had this issue fixed, they weren't available to me since they weren't on F-Droid. I later spent an entire evening trying to build the Schildbach app without success. I ended up coming back to it later and eventually had to create a new VM just to build the app. This worked after struggling through a number of frustrating issues with the Shildbach's brief but outdated build process. It's like so many other things: it's an easy thing to do if you know how to do it.
As I'd never built an Android app before I didn't realize that I had to sign the app. IIRC my signing key has to be signed by Google or something like that such that I was never able to get the app installed.
Since I'm venting about my issues with Schildbach's app I'll add the following. With all my other issues I needed to upgrade my phone's firmware at one point and decided it would be best to just completely wipe it clean and start over. Imagine my frustration when I tried to restore the wallet backup and when selecting the wallet backup file I get an error that the file can't be found. There was no help to be found on this issue. After pouring through hundreds of commit messages I finally found a clue that suggested there was a change in the app that was causing it. After installing the oldest version of the app from F-Droid I was able to restore the wallet and subsequently install the "new" version (from 2019). This seems like the sort of thing that should've been documented somewhere other an obscure commit message.
That was the long way of answering your question. No, I'm not trying to permanently move to Electrum--you might someday find a similar rant about the difficulties I've had with Electrum.
But I'm done with Schildbach's app and can't imagine I'll ever want to come back to it.
I appreciate all that Schildbach and his team do, but it sure as heck seems to suffer some of the same lack of cohesiveness, purpose, direction, and diversity of skills that open source projects are known for.
I'll step off my soap box now
... until my next post.
Thanks again!
cdoug