Since we will use Android emulator as one of the virtual hardware platforms, we need to use one particular Android version throughout this book. At the time of writing, the latest Android version is Android 7 (Nougat). We will use Android 7 throughout the book. I started work on this book with Android 6, so the source code for Android 6 is also available in my GitHub repository at https://github.com/shugaoye.
From the first release to Android 7, both the development environment and the AOSP source code have been changed a lot. We will have a brief look at various Android versions first before we talk about the development environment setup.
To set up the AOSP build environment, there are two things that you need to pay special attention to the host environment and Java SDK. Even though the recommended host environment is Ubuntu running on Intel architecture, the hardware architecture...