Book Image

Android System Programming

By : Roger Ye, Shen Liu
Book Image

Android System Programming

By: Roger Ye, Shen Liu

Overview of this book

Android system programming involves both hardware and software knowledge to work on system level programming. The developers need to use various techniques to debug the different components in the target devices. With all the challenges, you usually have a deep learning curve to master relevant knowledge in this area. This book will not only give you the key knowledge you need to understand Android system programming, but will also prepare you as you get hands-on with projects and gain debugging skills that you can use in your future projects. You will start by exploring the basic setup of AOSP, and building and testing an emulator image. In the first project, you will learn how to customize and extend the Android emulator. Then you’ll move on to the real challenge—building your own Android system on VirtualBox. You’ll see how to debug the init process, resolve the bootloader issue, and enable various hardware interfaces. When you have a complete system, you will learn how to patch and upgrade it through recovery. Throughout the book, you will get to know useful tips on how to integrate and reuse existing open source projects such as LineageOS (CyanogenMod), Android-x86, Xposed, and GApps in your own system.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we started with an introduction of debugging tips for recovery and the updater. The same method can be used for other native applications as well. After that, we enhanced both recovery and the updater to support our customized system image, which can be used as a normal system image and also can be used to support a two stages boot. We also added features such as apply image from the VirtualBox shared folder and created partitions in recovery. Finally, we analyzed two famous open source update packages: Xpose and GApps. We can apply them to x86vbox devices without any problems.

We have concluded the entire book now. I hope as a system developer you can benefit from the concepts, hands-on practices, and source code in this book. If you can build and test the two devices, x86emu and x86vbox, in this book yourself, you should be able to get enough experience to start your own Android system...