Building the Android Open Source Project

Jun 29 2020 , Other, Ubuntu 18.04, Other Other, Ubuntu 18.04, Other

Working on the Android platform is a task addressed by Google and OEMs mostly. In this tutorial, you’ll get insights into building the AOSP. By Antonio Roa-Valverde.

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Building the Android Open Source Project

20 mins

Customizing the Boot Animation

To change the boot animation in your AOSP build, you need to use the same target you selected earlier in the lunch menu: aosp_x86_64-eng.

Open aosp_x86_64.mk from /home/aosp/source/build/make/target/product. At the bottom of the file, add the following lines:

# Boot animation
PRODUCT_COPY_FILES += \
    device/generic/x86_64/bootanimation.zip:system/media/bootanimation.zip

This tells the build process to copy your animation file to system/media/bootanimation.zip. This is one of the paths where the boot loader will look for a bootanimation.zip file, as described earlier.

Then, copy bootanimation.zip into /home/aosp/source/device/generic/x86_64/.

In aosp_x86_64.mk, find the line starting with PRODUCT_ARTIFACT_PATH_REQUIREMENT_WHITELIST, then add system/media/bootanimation.zip \ after the last \.

Without this, the build process won’t allow you to copy the ZIP file to system/media. The resulting code should look like this:

PRODUCT_ARTIFACT_PATH_REQUIREMENT_WHITELIST += \
    root/init.zygote32_64.rc \
    root/init.zygote64_32.rc \
    system/media/bootanimation.zip \

Finally, save the file and execute the m command to create a new build with the changes. Don’t worry, the build will take only a few minutes — no tea this time! :]

Once the build is done, open the emulator by running emulator in your terminal. Tadaaa! Your emulator shows now your custom animation while booting.

Custom boot animation showing raywenderlich.com animation

To avoid this situation, the recommended alternative is to create your own product. Your challenge is to create the necessary configuration files and add your product as a new entry to the lunch menu.

Check out the Google documentation for building a product for more information.

Challenge: To add your custom boot animation, you modified the original AOSP sources, which can create conflicts when updating the codebase. Remember, there’s a new Android release every year.

Congratulations! You just built your very own Android version. Be proud, this is a quest not everyone has accomplished!

Where to Go From Here?

Download the final project using the Download Materials button at the top or bottom of this tutorial.

In this tutorial, you set up your development environment to build AOSP and you added a small customization by replacing the boot animation. You could now try to design your own animation and include it in your build. Surprise us with your design skills!

What you covered here is just the beginning of the AOSP adventure. There’s a lot to learn when it comes to Android platform development. Check out the official AOSP documentation for more information.

If you’re interested in navigating the AOSP source tree online, use the Android code search tool. This will help you get to know the source tree.

Hopefully, this tutorial supported you in your first steps with AOSP. If you have any questions about what you covered or if you want to show off your own Android customization, please join the discussion below!