The Android build system is officially supported by Ubuntu Linux. Google assures that the system setup, the environment setup, and all the requirements are easily reproducible on this particular Linux distribution. The truth is, nowadays, every Linux distribution can be prepared to perform a proper Android build with little effort.

To be closest to the guidelines and because we think that Ubuntu is the easiest system to set up for the job, in this book we are going to use Ubuntu Linux 15.04 to perform all our building procedures.

If you are working on OS X or Windows and you prefer to stick to these operating systems, we are going to show you how to achieve our goal even using a virtual machine.