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# Android

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- Android tethering
- Android Debug Bridge

Plug your phone to your computer using a USB cable adapted for your device. Make sure this USB cable has a data line (not all cables do).

On your smartphone, you should see the charging icon. If this is the case, go to your notifications, scroll to the bottom until you see the notification saying that your phone is connected in Charging mode.

Click on the notification, and then set it to File transfer mode, MTP or something similar.

You should now see your phone being detected by most desktop environments.

## Synchronization

There are various applications to transfer files, synchronize notifications and more.

### All-in-one

- KDE Connect (kdeconnect) – integrates your Android device with the KDE or Gnome desktop (featuring synced notifications & clipboard, multimedia control, and file/URL sharing).

### Synchronized notifications

- a2lnAUR – provides notification synchronization over LAN featuring authentication, encryption and more

### Transferring files

- USB cable
  - Media Transfer Protocol for modern Android devices
  - USB mass storage for older devices
  - Android Debug Bridge
- special USB sticks / regular USB stick with adapter
- Bluetooth
- Arch Linux software with Android counterparts
  - client or server for protocols that can be used to transfer files (eg. SSH, FTP, Samba or HTTP)
  - cloud synchronization clients
  - Syncthing
  - sendanywhereAUR – cross-platform file sharing
  - qrcpAUR – transfer files over Wi-Fi from your computer to your mobile device by scanning a QR code
  - LocalSend - An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

## App development

The officially supported way to build Android apps is to use #Android Studio.[1]

### Android Studio

Android Studio is the official Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. It provides integrated Android developer tools for development and debugging.

You can install it with the android-studioAUR package. For the Beta branch, install the android-studio-betaAUR package. For the Canary branch, install the android-studio-canaryAUR package.

Android Studio creates an `.android` directory in home directory. To reset Android Studio, this directory can be removed.

Note

- Make sure you properly set the Java environment otherwise android-studio will not start. However, in newer versions Java is included by default, so it is not necessary do so; see #Java Development Kit.
- If Android Studio shows up as a blank window try exporting `_JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1`, see issue #57675.

The Android Studio Setup Wizard installs the required #SDK packages and places the SDK by default in `~/Android/Sdk`.

To build apps from the command-line (using e.g. `./gradlew assembleDebug`) set the ANDROID_HOME environment variable to your SDK location.

Android Studio has experimental Wayland support since 2024.2, you can enable it by going to Menu > Help > Edit Custom VM Options and adding `-Dawt.toolkit.name=WLToolkit` as a parameter.

### SDK packages

Android SDK packages can be installed directly from upstream using #Android Studio's SDK Manager or the sdkmanager command line tool (part of the Android SDK Tools). Some Android SDK packages are also available as AUR packages, they generally install to `/opt/android-sdk/`.

The required SDK packages are:

Android SDK Package | SDK-style path | AUR package | AUR dummy | CLI tools
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Command-Line Tools | tools | android-sdk-cmdline-tools-latestAUR | android-sdk-cmdline-tools-latest-dummyAUR | apkanalyzer, avdmanager, lint, retrace, screenshot2, sdkmanager
SDK Build-Tools | build-tools;version | android-sdk-build-toolsAUR | android-sdk-build-tools-dummyAUR | aapt, aapt2, aidl, apksigner, bcc_compat, d8, dexdump, dx, lld, llvm-rs-cc, mainDexClasses, split-select, zipalign
SDK Platform-Tools | platform-tools | android-sdk-platform-toolsAUR | android-sdk-platform-tools-dummyAUR | adb, dmtracedump, e2fsdroid, etc1tool, #fastboot, hprof-conv, make_f2fs, make_f2fs_casefold, mke2fs, sload_f2fs, sqlite3, systrace
SDK Platform | platforms;android-level | android-platformAUR, older versions | android-platform-dummyAUR (unnecessary)

The android-tools package provides adb, #fastboot, `e2fsdroid` and `mke2fs.android` from the SDK Platform-Tools along with `mkbootimg` and `ext2simg`.

Note

- Since the Android SDK contains 32-bit binaries, you must enable the multilib repository. Otherwise you will get `error: target not found: lib32-*` error messages.
- If you choose to directly install SDK packages from upstream, install the AUR packages of the AUR dummy column to pull in the required dependencies.
- If you get a `java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError` exception when attempting to run `sdkmanager`, use OpenJDK 8's JRE temporarily, by installing the package jre8-openjdk and switching the Java environment. See Failed to run sdkmanager --list with Java 9

#### Android Emulator

The Android Emulator is available as the `emulator` SDK package, the android-emulatorAUR package, and there is also a dummy package for it: android-emulator-dummyAUR.

To run the Android Emulator you need an Intel or ARM System Image. You can install them through the AUR, with the sdkmanager or using Android Studio's AVD Manager.

If Wayland is used, make sure to read Wayland#Qt, as it might be the case that the emulator complains about Wayland.

#### Other SDK packages in the AUR

The Android Support Library is now available online from Google's Maven repository. You can also install it offline through the `extras;android;m2repository` SDK package (also available as android-support-repositoryAUR).

#### Using /opt/android-sdk as read-only with CoW

The AUR packages install the SDK in `/opt/android-sdk/`. This directory has root permissions, so to use it as your regular user, you should have another directory with write permissions.

To do so, you should use fuse-overlayfs, a FUSE package around overlayfs. This will allow to access read-only `/opt/android-sdk/` directory and write modifications without copying the data (Copy-On-Write conception).

First, create directories to host the overlay:

    $ LOWER=/opt/android-sdk
    $ UPPER="$HOME/.local/android/.sdk/upper"
    $ WORK="$HOME/.local/android/.sdk/work"
    $ ANDROID_HOME="$HOME/.local/android/sdk"
    $ mkdir -p "$UPPER" "$WORK" "$ANDROID_HOME"

Then mount your overlay and export the Android home variable:

    $ fuse-overlayfs -o squash_to_uid=$(id -u),squash_to_gid=$(id -g),lowerdir=$LOWER,upperdir=$UPPER,workdir=$WORK $ANDROID_HOME
    $ export ANDROID_HOME

You can now use any Android tool (`sdk-manager` for instance) with your copy-on-write setup.

You can unmount it as with any other FUSE fs:

    $ fusermount -u $ANDROID_HOME

### Other IDEs

Android Studio is the official Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. Alternatively, you can use Netbeans with the NBAndroid-V2. All are described below.

#### Netbeans

If you prefer using Netbeans as your IDE and want to develop Android applications, use NBAndroid-V2 .

Install android-sdkAUR package and follow the instructions from the NBANDROID README.

#### Vim / Neovim

It is possible to write `flutter` applications for Android and iOS using (Neo)vim like an IDE. Install coc using a Vim plugin manager. Also install the coc-flutter extension for autocompletion (like in Android Studio) and to load the code into an Android emulator.

#### Emacs

To develop a mobile `flutter` application using Emacs, as the official instruction at flutter.dev suggests, install lsp-dart.

### Other Tools

#### Marvin

Marvin is a tool which helps beginners set up an Android development environment. Installing marvin_dscAUR helps you set up the following things: JDK, Android SDK, IDE(s), and AVD.

## Building

Please note that these instructions are based on the official AOSP build instructions. Other Android-derived systems such as LineageOS will often require extra steps.

### Required packages

Note Before doing the following steps, the multilib repository must be enabled in `/etc/pacman.conf`.

To build AOSP 13 you need a TTF font installed (e.g. ttf-dejavu) and the dependencies of the aosp-develAUR metapackage.

Additionally, LineageOS (as well as other many Android distributions like ArrowOS,PixelExperience etc) requires the following dependencies of the lineageos-develAUR metapackage.

### Java Development Kit

The required JDK version depends on the Android version you are building:

- For Android 9 (Pie) and up, Java is included with the Android source and no separate installation is needed.
- For Android 7 and 8 (Nougat and Oreo), OpenJDK 8 is required, which is available with the jdk8-openjdk package.

Note For older Android versions, where Java is not included, Java is expected to be in `/usr/lib/jvm/java-version-openjdk-amd64`.

Set JAVA_HOME to avoid this requirement and match the Arch Linux installation path. Example:

    $ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-version-openjdk

This change will be valid only for the current terminal session.

### Setting up the build environment

Install the repo package.

Create a directory to build.

    $ mkdir ~/android
    $ cd ~/android

Note Do not build under a directory where you do not have read/write access.

### Downloading the source code

This will clone the repositories. You only need to do this the first time you build Android, or if you want to switch branches.

- The `repo` has a `-j` switch that operates similarly to the one used with `make`. Since it controls the number of simultaneous downloads, you should adjust the value depending on downstream network bandwidth.

- You will need to specify a branch (list of branches) to check out with the `-b` switch. If you leave the switch out, you will get the so-called master branch.

    $ repo init --partial-clone -b main -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest
    $ repo sync -j4

Note To further decrease sync times, you can use the `-c` switch with the repo command as such:

    $ repo sync -j8 -c

The `-c` switch will only sync the branch which is specified in the manifest, which in turn is determined by the branch specified with the `-b` switch, or the default branch set by the repository maintainer.

Wait a long time. Just the uncompiled source code, along with the `.repo` and `.git` directories that are used to keep track of it, are very large. As of Android 10, at least 250 GB of free disk space is required.

Note If you want to update your local copy of the Android source, at a later time, simply enter the build directory, load the Virtualenv, and re-sync:

    $ repo sync

### Building the code

This should do what you need for AOSP:

    $ source build/envsetup.sh
    $ lunch full-eng
    $ make -j4

If you run lunch without arguments, it will ask what build you want to create. Use -j with a number between one and two times number of cores/threads.

The build takes a very long time.

Note

- Make sure you have enough RAM. Android will use the `/tmp` directory heavily. By default the size of `/tmp` is half the size of your RAM. If it fills up, the build will fail. 4 GiB of RAM or more is recommended. If `/tmp` is not large enough, you can increase it. Make sure you have the combined RAM and swap space to back it. Alternatively, you can get rid of the tmpfs from fstab all together.
- From the Android Building and Running guide:

    GNU make can handle parallel tasks with a `-jN` argument, and it is common to use a number of tasks N that is between 1 and 2 times the number of hardware threads on the computer being used for the build. E.g. on a dual-E5520 machine (2 CPUs, 4 cores per CPU, 2 threads per core), the fastest builds are made with commands between `make -j16` and `make -j32`.

### Testing the build

When finished, run/test the final image(s).

    $ emulator

### Creating a flashable Image

To create an image that can be flashed it is necessary to:

    make -j8 updatepackage

This will create a zip image under `out/target/product/hammerhead` (hammerhead being the device name) that can be flashed.

## Flashing

In some cases, you want to return to the stock Android after flashing custom ROMs to your Android mobile device. For flashing instructions of your device, please use XDA forums.

### Fastboot

Fastboot (as well as adb) is included in the android-tools package.

Note

- Restoring firmwares using `fastboot` can be quite tricky, but you might want to browse XDA developers forums for a stock firmware, which is mostly a `*.zip` file, but inside of it, comes with the firmware files and `flash-all.sh` script. For example, Google Nexus firmwares include `flash-all.sh` script or another example could be for OnePlus One - XDA thread, where you can find firmwares with included `flash-all.sh` script.
- If you get a `no permissions` error or execution just hangs with `< waiting for any device >` then you need to run `fastboot` as the root user. Alternatively you can install android-udev or the AUR package android-udev-gitAUR and reconnect your device.

### Samsung devices

Samsung devices cannot be flashed using Fastboot tool. Alternatives are Heimdall and Odin (by using Windows and VirtualBox).

#### samloader

To download original Samsung firmware, a platform independent script, samloader can be used.

#### Heimdall

heimdall is a cross-platform open-source tool suite used to flash firmware (also known as ROMs) onto Samsung mobile devices and is also known as an alternative to Odin.

The flashing instructions can be found on Heimdall's GitHub repository or on XDA forums.

#### Odin (Virtualbox)

Note This section only covers preparation and not flashing instructions. Search XDA developers forums to find flashing instructions for a specific device. For example, Samsung Galaxy S4.

It is also possible to restore firmware (Android) on the Samsung devices using Odin, but inside the VirtualBox.

Arch Linux (host) preparation:

1. Install VirtualBox together with its extension pack and guest additions.
2. Install your preferred, but compatible with Odin, Windows operating system (with VirtualBox guest additions) into a virtual hard drive using VirtualBox.
3. Open VirtualBox settings of your Windows operating system, navigate to USB, then tick (or make sure it is ticked) Enable USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller.
4. At VirtualBox running Windows operating system, click in the menu bar Devices > USB Devices, then click on your Samsung mobile device from the list, which is connected to your computer via USB.

Windows (guest) preparation:

1. Install Samsung drivers.
2. Install Odin.
3. Download required Samsung firmware (Android) for your smartphone model.

Check if configuration is working:

1. Turn your device into Download mode and connect to your Linux machine.
2. In virtual machine toolbar, select Devices > USB > ...Samsung... device.
3. Open Odin. The white box (a big one at the bottom-left side) named Message, should print a line similar to this:

    <ID:0/003> Added!!

which means that your device is visible to Odin & Windows operating system and is ready to be flashed.

## Run Android apps on Arch Linux

There are several projects and methods which support running Android on Arch Linux (or other distributions). As listed below:

- Container-based solutions tend to be the most popular. They are the closest you can get to run Android app natively on a non-Android Linux kernel. They tend to be the best integrated with your system and have good performance. Notable ones are:
  - Waydroid is a fork of Anbox, and it is gaining popularity. It is more performant, because it runs closer to the hardware. It is based on a newer LineageOS 20.0 (Android 13) based image with the option to install the Google Play Store and other Open Gapps. Beside running apps in standalone windows, it can also run a full Android UI.

- There are also a few Chromium extensions that can run android apps:
  - Arc Welder was an extension by google to test how apps would run on Chrome OS, but is now discontinued.
  - ARChon is an unmaintained open source extension to run android apps on Chromium-based browsers. As of July 2023, the sample app does not work because "Old versions of Chrome apps won't open on Linux devices after 2022".

- Of course it is also possible to run a full android emulator. One upside to this is that you can run arm apps on x86. A downside is worse performance. Examples are:
  - Android studio's built-in emulator, as earlier mentioned in this article.
  - Genymotion is a pay for Android emulation/testing suite.

- There are also x86_64 compatible OS images based on Android, which can run inside common virtual machines (including KVM with VirtIO GPU) or on bare metal.
  - Bliss OS is an Android-based open source OS that incorporates many optimizations and features, pre-rooted with KernelSU. ARM emulation is also included.
  - For older Android versions, see Android-x86.

## Troubleshooting

### Android Studio: Android Virtual Devices show 'failed to load'.

Make sure you have exported the variable `ANDROID_HOME` as explained in #Android Studio.

### Android Studio: 'failed to create the SD card'

If you try to run an AVD (Android Virtual Device) under x86_64 Arch and get the error above, install the lib32-gcc-libs package from the multilib repository.

### Eclipse: During Debugging "Source not found"

Most probably the debugger wants to step into the Java code. As the source code of Android does not come with the Android SDK, this leads to an error. The best solution is to use step filters to not jump into the Java source code. Step filters are not activated by default. To activate them: Window > Preferences > Java > Debug > Step Filtering. Consider to select them all. If appropriate you can add the android.* package. See Use Step Filters.

### ValueError: unsupported pickle protocol

One fix is to issue:

    $ rm ~/.repopickle_.gitconfig

If that does not work, then try this:

    $ find /path/to/android-root -name .repopickle_config -delete

### libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast OR AVD does not load and no error message displayed

Sometimes, beginning to load an AVD will cause an error message similar to this to be displayed, or the loading process will appear to finish but no AVD will load and no error message will be displayed.

The AVD loads an incorrect version of libstdc++, you can remove the folder libstdc++ from `~/.android-sdk/emulator/lib64` (for 64-bit) or `~/.android-sdk/emulator/lib` (for 32-bit) , e.g.:

    $ rm -r ~/.android-sdk/emulator/lib64/libstdc++

Note that in versions before Android Studio 3.0, this directory was in a different location:

    $ rm -r ~/Android/Sdk/emulator/lib64/libstdc++

Alternatively you can set and export ANDROID_EMULATOR_USE_SYSTEM_LIBS in ~/.profile as:

    export ANDROID_EMULATOR_USE_SYSTEM_LIBS=1

Reference: Android Studio user guide

Fix for the .desktop file might be achieved by using env command, prefixing the Exec line Desktop entries#Modify environment variables

    env ANDROID_EMULATOR_USE_SYSTEM_LIBS=1

### sh: glxinfo: command not found

Here is the full error:

    Cannot launch AVD in emulator.
    Output:
    sh: glxinfo: command not found
    sh: glxinfo: command not found
    libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
    libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
    X Error of failed request:  BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
      Major opcode of failed request:  154 (GLX)
      Minor opcode of failed request:  24 (X_GLXCreateNewContext)
      Value in failed request:  0x0
      Serial number of failed request:  32
      Current serial number in output stream:  33
    QObject::~QObject: Timers cannot be stopped from another thread

You can try to install glxinfo (mesa-utils) but if your computer has enough power you could simply use software to render graphics. To do so, go to Tools > Android > AVD Manager, edit the AVD (click the pencil icon), then select Software - GLES 2.0 for Emulated Performance > Graphics.

### Android Emulator: no keyboard input in xfwm4

In xfwm4, the vertical toolbar buttons window that is on the right of the emulator takes focus from the emulator and consumes keyboard events. (bug report)

You can use the workaround described in [2]:

1. Open the xfwm4 settings.
2. Switch to the Focus tab.
3. Change the Focus Model to "Focus follow mouse".
4. Disable Automatically raise windows when they receive focus option below.

### Android Emulator: Window is shaking and blinking when used in WM tiled mode

When using Tiled Window Manager like dwm, Android Emulator will shake and blink. You can use the workaround described in krohnkite issue 72 (window floating is induced by `Alt+f` in dwm).

### Android Emulator: Segmentation fault (core dumped)

When using Nouveau drivers try to disable gpu hardware acceleration.

In some devices it can only be done by editing `$HOME/.avd/device_name.avd/config.ini`.[3]

1. Set `hw.gpu.enabled=no`
2. Set `hw.gpu.mode=off`

### Android Emulator: Not launching / qemu-system: address resolution failed

There is an issue where no emulator-window shows up after starting a virtual device in android-studio. If this applies to you, launch the emulator from the console and inspect its output:

    $ emulator -avd $(emulator -list-avds)

If on any line, it says anything similar to:

    qemu-system-x86_64 : address resolution failed for ::1:46189: Name or service not known

you may try disabling IPv6:

    $ sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

If this solves the issue and the virtual device shows up in android-studio, you may consider a permanent change:

    /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf

    net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

### Android Emulator: Emulator terminated with exit code 134

If running Wayland, a graphical error like `The emulator process for AVD Pixel_4_API_33 has terminated` may be worked around by forcing X11 with `QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb`.

### adb: sideload connection failed: insufficient permissions for device

If you get the errors:

    adb: sideload connection failed: insufficient permissions for device
    See [https://developer.android.com/tools/device.html] for more information

or

    adb: trying pre-KitKat sideload method...
    adb: pre-KitKat sideload connection failed: insufficient permissions for device
    See [https://developer.android.com/tools/device.html] for more information

You might be able to solve it by restarting the adb server:

     $ adb kill-server
     # adb start-server

Alternatively, make sure you have installed the Android udev rules. See #Fastboot.

### License not accepted

Since SDK packages from the AUR are installed to `/opt/android-sdk` which is owned by root, the `sdkmanager --licenses` command for accepting the licenses must also be ran as root. If this script is not ran as root, accepting the licenses will silently fail.

You can confirm the licenses were successfully accepted by checking if the license appears in the `/opt/android-sdk/licenses` directory.

### Building Lineageos error: module manifest_input.classifier-service does not exist

This error arises on devices that require a vendor directory to be populated before breakfast will succeed, as noted in the warning section. Extract proprietary blobs and continue.

### Building Lineageos common.mk: error:missing libthermalclient (or other library or .so file)"

(hardware/qcom/sm7250/display/composer/../common.mk: error: "vendor.qti.hardware.display.composer-service (EXECUTABLES android-arm64) missing libthermalclient (SHARED_LIBRARIES andr oid-arm64)" You can set ALLOW_MISSING_DEPENDENCIES=true in your environment if this is intentional, but that may defer real problems until later in the build.)

You either have not extracted proprietary blobs, the image you extracted from did not have all of them, or the extraction script did not work correctly. Either find a different image to extract blobs from, use a different extraction script or use blobs from themuppets

### Building Lineageos AssertionError: Failed to execute: out/soong/host/linux-x86/bin/mke2fs -O ^has_journal...

e2fsprogs disabled orphan_file in version 1.47.0, so it either must be downgraded for the old command to succeed, or the option orphan_file should be removed from /etc/mke2fs.conf on the machine you're building on, since the bundled mke2fs reads the host's config file.

To downgrade: e2fsprogs 1.46.0 on arch linux archive

### Building Lineageos ExternalError: Failed to run command '['brillo_update_payload

if you scroll up a bit, see: Sum of sizes in google_dynamic_partitions_partition_list is 4883337216, which is greater than google_dynamic_partitions_size (4873781248) [0224/122117.280262:FATAL:generate_delta_main.cc(619)] Check failed: payload_config.target.ValidateDynamicPartitionMetadata().

Some users had success with setting the option `export WITH_GMS=true`, GMS being Google Mobile Services, more commonly - GApps. This option may or may not be suitable to your needs. Some strongly discourage using this option even as a fix to this error.

Issue seems to come from changes being made, resulting in larger file sizes. To leave more space for the partitions, it is recommended to lower the parameter `BOARD_SYSTEMIMAGE_PARTITION_RESERVED_SIZE := 17523507` by an amount at least equivalent to the difference between the numbers you get in the error. This option is set in a makefile, for example in `lineage/device/google/blueline/BoardConfigLineage.mk` or, if you don't see it there, in a file it includes, for example google devices have common parameters in `device/google/redbull/BoardConfigLineage.mk`

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