The Design and Implementation of an Integrated Building Environment for Android Systems

In recent years many embedded system products are shipped with Android system installed as their operating systems. Building an installable system image file of Android, however, is not trivial and there is no graphical user interface (GUI) for the official Android build system. Although quite a lot of guiding information and helpful resources are available in addition to the official documentation provided by Google, it is not uncommon that the building process failed due to some subtle mistakes and the developer felt frustrated. When system customization is desired, such as tailoring the source code or removing some unnecessary modules from the source code, the burden is even greater because the building rules of Android system lack enough flexibility and Android system has become bigger and more complicated during the past years. It is not only very challenging but also very difficult, if not impossible, to implement the desired tailoring without help from certain analysis tools. This paper presents the development of a GUI based integrated building environment for Android. The main goal is to help smoothly and easily build a custom system image of Android via providing GUIs and integrating the functions needed and desirable in carrying out the building process. The contributions of this work mainly include: (1) an approach to analyzing the module dependency of Android source code that helps remove unnecessary modules or features in customizing Android system image; (2) the GUIs that help users easily and quickly build an Android system image; and (3) an integrated building environment that helps achieve building automation of Android. This integrated building environment therefore is useful and helpful in building Android system images.