I’m not an Android developer, but I plan to learn this along with the Kotlin language. The Android Studio seems to have proprietary components and therefore marked as non-FOSS on Flathub store. The Android SDK specifically (at least builds provided by Google) is also seems to be licensed under non-FOSS license.
Android Studio is a powerful IDE with rich toolbox for Android development, but it feels like strong lock-in on closed technology even in case we have Android as a FOSS platform in face of AOSP.
I’m just curious to learn, is Android development can be setup to be 100% FOSS? What environment, toolchain, and editors like IntelliJ IDEA CE/VSCodium/Neovim we can possibly use to achieve this?
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I’ve also just started learning Android dev, avoiding Android Studio. So far I’ve followed this blog and have a Java “Hello World” app building out of a makefile (without even Gradle!), but using the Google SDK and build tools.
I believe the build tools are FOSS, but I didn’t know that about the SDK; just searching now Replicant has some links to FOSS SDK-related things but that page hasn’t been updated in 2 years and nothing seems very easy. Would be interested to hear if you manage to get a FOSS version working.
I have made flutter apps without Android Studio. You basically needed to download the SDK which is FOSS, and then tell your IDE where it is. This process may be a little tedious. Android Studio makes everything easy, like automatically downloading the SDK, setting up emulators etc. I jsed VSCodium back then.
Flutter is just a UI framework, it still depends on the Android SDK.
Oh, that’s interesting!
You could use intelij idea open (you can find it on flathub, it is marked as FOSS) with the android plugin will give you a similar experience to Android Studio. It worked for me well and I think all things were FOSS.
Thanks! It worth exploring
I build a Tauri app without Android Studio, with ‘cargo tauri android build’. you still need the android SDK.
I tried with neovim plus SDK, had to give up due to lack of decent LSPs I think, they were all old, unmaintained. Android Studio really sucks all the oxygen out of the room.
