Flower Android Client Example with Kotlin and TensorFlow Lite 2022#

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This example is similar to the Flower Android Example in Java:

This example demonstrates a federated learning setup with Android Clients. The training on Android is done on a CIFAR10 dataset using TensorFlow Lite. The setup is as follows:

  • The CIFAR10 dataset is randomly split across 10 clients. Each Android client holds a local dataset of 5000 training examples and 1000 test examples.

  • The FL server runs in Python but all the clients run on Android.

  • We use a strategy called FedAvgAndroid for this example.

  • The strategy is vanilla FedAvg with a custom serialization and deserialization to handle the Bytebuffers sent from Android clients to Python server.

Set up#

Start by cloning the example project. We prepared a single-line command that you can copy into your shell which will checkout the example for you:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/adap/flower.git && mv flower/examples/android-kotlin . && rm -rf flower && cd android-kotlin

Download the training and testing data from https://www.dropbox.com/s/coeixr4kh8ljw6o/cifar10.zip?dl=1 and extract them to client/app/src/main/assets/data.

Download the TFLite model from https://github.com/FedCampus/dyn_flower_android_drf/files/11858642/cifar10.zip to client/app/src/main/assets/model/cifar10.tflite. Alternatively, see gen_tflite/README.md for information on how to convert the CIFAR10 models to a .tflite file.

Install dependencies#

Project dependencies (such as tensorflow and flwr) are defined in pyproject.toml. We recommend Poetry to install those dependencies and manage your virtual environment (Poetry installation), but feel free to use a different way of installing dependencies and managing virtual environments if you have other preferences.

poetry install
poetry shell

Poetry will install all your dependencies in a newly created virtual environment. To verify that everything works correctly you can run the following command:

poetry run python3 -c "import flwr"

If you don’t see any errors you’re good to go!

Alternatively, with Pip. 
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the demo#

Start the Flower server at ./:

python3 server.py
Or without the "3" on windows. 
python server.py

Install the app on physical Android devices and launch it.

Note: the highest tested JDK version the app supports is 16; it fails to build using JDK 19 on macOS.

In the user interface, fill in:

  • Device number: a unique number among 1 ~ 10. This number is used to choose the partition of the training dataset.

  • Server IP: an IPv4 address of the computer your backend server is running on. You can probably find it in your system network settings.

  • Server port: 8080.

Push the first button and load the dataset. This may take a minute.

Push the second button and start the training.