The Search Activity will be making a lot of queries to various search providers, so we need to integrate testing and production API keys into the product. I think there's precedent for this with geolocation API keys, and there's definitely precedent with MOZ_{MOZILLA,GOOGLE,BING}_API_KEY. The latter keys are integrated into Gecko via the URL formatter; these keys need to be available to pure-Java (background) code. I expect that will just mean pre-processed code, strings, or raw resources.

eedens: can you explain where you got the keys you distributed to me, and what you know about the key provisioning plan going forward?

The keys are from the developer panels from Yelp and Flickr; they're just temporary keys that we can use right now. For development, on the short-term, the plan is to build the keys into the APK, without including them in MC. Long term, we've talked about routing traffic through a proxy that holds the keys internally.

I don't think this is an issue anymore, since we're not using any search APIs that require keys.