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Android - Gentoo wiki

Android is an operating system developed by the Open Handset Alliance, led by Google, and mainly used on smartphones, tablets and multimedia boxes. It mainly runs on the ARM 6 and 7 architecture, but it has also been ported to x86 and MIPS. It uses the Linux kernel with a custom userland which is Apache licensed.

Gentoo has some Android-specific packages:

Setting up an Android dev environment without Android Studio

To set up a development environment for Android without installing Android Studio (e.g. because you'd prefer to use app-editors/vim or app-editors/emacs for development):

  • Ensure none of the packages listed at the start of this page are installed, in order to avoid duplicate installations and potential conflicts.

root #emerge app-eselect/eselect-java

and select the appropriate Java VM as the user under which you'll be doing development:

user $eselect java-vm list

Available Java Virtual Machines:
  [1]   openjdk-bin-8 
  [2]   openjdk-bin-17

user $eselect java-vm set user openjdk-bin-17

root #emerge acct-group/android

  • Add that user to the android group:

root #gpasswd -a <USER> android

  • Create a directory for the Android SDK, e.g. ~/android:

user $unzip -d ~/android/ platform-tools_r34.0.5-linux.zip

user $unzip -d ~/android/ commandlinetools-linux-11076708_latest.zip

  • Configure the relevant path environment variables for your shell (e.g. in ~/.bash_profile):

CODE 

export ANDROID_HOME="${HOME}/android"
export PATH="${PATH}:${ANDROID_HOME}/platform-tools";
export PATH="${PATH}:${ANDROID_HOME}/cmdline-tools/bin";

Apply the group and environment changes by logging the dev user out of any existing sessions, then logging that user back in again.

  • Use sdkamanager to list available platform SDK versions, and install the latest platform:

user $sdkmanager --sdk_root=${HOME}/android --list

user $sdkmanager --sdk_root=${HOME}/android --install "platforms;android-34"

  • Install the appropriate version of Android build-tools for that platform, and refresh cmdline-tools:

user $sdkmanager --sdk_root=${HOME}/android --install "build-tools;34.0.0"

user $sdkmanager --sdk_root=${HOME}/android --install "cmdline-tools;latest"

  • Review and accept the relevant licenses:

user $sdkmanager --sdk_root=${HOME}/android --licenses

Detailed information about environment variables affecting the Android SDK can be found at https://developer.android.com/tools/variables.

apktool

apktool, available in the Pentoo overlay (devutil/apktool::pentoo), is a tool for reverse-engineering APK files (MIME type application/vnd.android.package-archive), including examining their contents. For example:

user $apktool d app.apk -o ./contents/

will extract the APK's files into a folder in the current directory called contents.

See also

External resources