The Android build system

Before digging into configuring and building your first Android system, we will have an overview of the build system itself, the tools involved, and the unique approach to the whole process Google has.

There is very little official documentation available about creating new modules and about the build system itself. Most of your knowledge at the end of this journey will come from your own hands-on experience and from our experience that we put in these pages.

An overview

As with lots of projects out there, open source or closed source, Android uses the powerful tool make to build the whole system, but compared to all other projects, Android uses it in a completely different way.

The common approach of using make would be to use a hierarchy of Makefiles: one single root Makefile retrieves and runs every other Makefile, contained in some of the subfolders of the project. Usually, every subfolder represents a submodule of the main project and it can be built alone or could...