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Ask HN: Does anyone compile Android from source?

I have a HTC 626s and I absolutely hate the HTC sense for this phone. I really want to put stock Android on it but I don't have a machine capable of building it and also no experience compiling large projects. 1.) would anyone be willing to build M or N for a 626s? 2.) if not, what's your experience been building Android?

Someone1234 10y ago
I don't think you understand what you're asking someone to do. You don't just download the Android source, type "make," and get something that would work on a HTC 626s. The biggest hindrance is finding the hardware drivers for newer versions of Android. That's why a lot of devices fall out of support, the hardware manufacturer never updated the driver to the latest version of Android. Best case scenario either the old drivers are still compatible with newer versions of Android (but you lose functionality) or the hardware manufacturer has updated drivers (which you can normally get from a different phone's flash dump). You may want to ask over at forum.xda-developers.com for your device or manufacturer. But what you're asking for is a lot more involved than you seem to think it is, and has little to do with being able to compile Android.
lovelearning 10y ago
Build it on some cloud server. I built my own images for the emulator and an Odroid mini computer, but never for any phone. The source tree is some 9 or 10 GBs, and I realized somewhere around the 2 GB mark that cloning it on my home connection is a waste of time and bandwidth. So I built them on a Linode 4GB server. Network and hard disk speeds were magnitudes better than anything at home. Took around 4-5 hours of reading and understanding the process (see links below) + 2-3 hours for each build. Removing vendor apps from the image is a simple matter of removing them from the correct config files. Since HTC seems to be a good open source citizen and makes their source code changes available, removing vendor apps and rebuilding an image is probably not very difficult. [1] http://source.android.com/source/index.html http://source.android.com/source/index.html [2] Building Custom ROM (2 videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_H4AlQaNa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_H4AlQaNa0 [3] Karim Yaghmour's Embedded Android series (4 videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLUXPxxJc5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLUXPxxJc5c
lnalx 10y ago
I plan to build - at least once in my lifetime - Android from scratch. I think this article[1] could help a lot. [1] http://xda-university.com/as-a-developer/getting-started-building-android-from-source http://xda-university.com/as-a-developer/getting-started-bui...

Someone1234 10y ago

I don't think you understand what you're asking someone to do. You don't just download the Android source, type "make," and get something that would work on a HTC 626s. The biggest hindrance is finding the hardware drivers for newer versions of Android. That's why a lot of devices fall out of support, the hardware manufacturer never updated the driver to the latest version of Android. Best case scenario either the old drivers are still compatible with newer versions of Android (but you lose functionality) or the hardware manufacturer has updated drivers (which you can normally get from a different phone's flash dump). You may want to ask over at forum.xda-developers.com for your device or manufacturer. But what you're asking for is a lot more involved than you seem to think it is, and has little to do with being able to compile Android.

lovelearning 10y ago

Build it on some cloud server. I built my own images for the emulator and an Odroid mini computer, but never for any phone. The source tree is some 9 or 10 GBs, and I realized somewhere around the 2 GB mark that cloning it on my home connection is a waste of time and bandwidth. So I built them on a Linode 4GB server. Network and hard disk speeds were magnitudes better than anything at home. Took around 4-5 hours of reading and understanding the process (see links below) + 2-3 hours for each build. Removing vendor apps from the image is a simple matter of removing them from the correct config files. Since HTC seems to be a good open source citizen and makes their source code changes available, removing vendor apps and rebuilding an image is probably not very difficult. [1] http://source.android.com/source/index.html http://source.android.com/source/index.html [2] Building Custom ROM (2 videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_H4AlQaNa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_H4AlQaNa0 [3] Karim Yaghmour's Embedded Android series (4 videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLUXPxxJc5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLUXPxxJc5c

lnalx 10y ago

I plan to build - at least once in my lifetime - Android from scratch. I think this article[1] could help a lot. [1] http://xda-university.com/as-a-developer/getting-started-building-android-from-source http://xda-university.com/as-a-developer/getting-started-bui...