Call for Help: making free software builds of the Android SDK

Congratulations and thank you to the people who worked for those builds to happen. If there are some guides/posts on how to use them that 'd be really helpful (if anyone can post them here or point to where they are).

Thanks for your supporting message!
Right now the easiest is downloading and extracting a bundle from https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/ but we’d like to setup the new repository so people could use grab individual components (and pick versions) directly from sdkmanager.
This requires overriding google’s repos in that tool, and setup the new repo accordingly. All help is welcome :slight_smile:

Btw I added a few static index.html so people can browse the files and get a better idea of what we got already.
@hans is the NoIndex web configuration a security measure or just a default that we could change?

I read this and I am not sure: Is a google maven repository clone planned too (with reproducible builds of the libraries if possible)? (this is the repository with the support libraries AND some closed source components which should not be cloned) This would have the benefit that Google can’t break builds by doing something stupid (it once was required to move the google maven repo to the top of the repo list because otherwise projects won’t build anymore). Moreover, it would allow developing Android Apps without interactions with Google servers (at every hit of the run button in android studio, a request is sent to check for library updates, this is not really something I like).

@l-jonas speaking for myself my main focus is the base NDK and SDK, but the project goal is providing Android dev tools without the non-free binary license.
A secondary goal is to provide dev tools to countries blocked by google.
Is the maven repository impacted by these?

Also for the privacy issue, maybe you can mitigate with a local caching proxy :slight_smile:

I set up a proxy (with HTTPS interception). The request at very run seems to be wrong. I was even able to use Android Studio without internet connection (without enabling the offline mode in the settings in Android Studio). Bad brain or this has changed during the last months.

FYI I added API-27 packages.
https://mirror.f-droid.org/android-free/repository/
Listing:
https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/

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And @cdesai 's F-Droid-flavored sys-image for emulators :slight_smile:

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What do you mean by this?

@JosephJones check a few posts above starting at :

Looks like it is quite easy to build the “sources” zipballs, that would be nice to include in this repo: Build your own android-28 sources · GitHub

Thanks for the recipe link!
Is there a difference with the packages that we already provide?
e.g. https://mirror.f-droid.org/android-free/repository/sdk-repo-linux-sources-userdebug.9.0.0_r33.zip

Ah, hehe, perhaps not, except for the file name. What do you think about using the same filenames as upstream?

Like this one?
https://mirror.f-droid.org/android-free/repository/sources-26_r01.zip
(I didn’t do it for all the builds for now since this needs to be automated and reformatted.)

Looks great, matches upstream: https://dl.google.com/android/repository/sources-26_r01.zip

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It seems that @beuc no longer maintains or hosts the android-rebuilds project. We need a new maintainer, and F-Droid can contribute hosting to someone what wants to maintain android-rebuilds and a binary repository.

It seems there is some new work on this: GitHub - wchen342/android-rebuilds: Rebuild SDK and NDK from source.

mirror.f-droid.org no longer hosts android-rebuilds binaries, it is now a round-robin DNS alias for mirrors which support rsync. F-Droid no longer runs any mirrors itself, so this was setup to ensure that other mirrors that synced from mirror.f-droid.org would continue to work. There is no real HTTP component or website any more.

What is the status of a Free SDK? I am looking to work on adding some apps to F-droid but I would rather not be dependent on proprietary software to do so. Do I need to build the SDK from source? That will take a while on my machine but it should be doable in a day.

It’s available on Debian:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/android-sdk-meta