Building Embedded Systems with AOSP

In our community, building embedded systems based on Linux, e.g. with Yocto or buildroot, is standard and well known. Considering Android, respectively the AOSP as a base system feels strange at the beginning as it is a huge ecosystem that implies high system requirements. Of course, embedded Android is not a solution for each issue. Nevertheless, the AOSP provides a sophisticated base platform which is packed with a

• modern UI stack
• robust media and camera implementation
• modern AI runtime
• well known abstraction between system and app development
• energy optimization

and lots of other helpful infrastructure.
This makes AOSP an interesting approach for building more complex embedded systems.

A first goal of this talk is to show in which situations choosing AOSP over a plain Linux system really adds value and where not. But where to start and how are the best workflows? The AOSP is a massive and complex code base with a few hundred GB of source code. Navigating the sources, finding the right place to do changes and working with several code repositories at once is a tough task at the beginning. Thus, the second goal of this talk is to share best practices and hints to avoid lots of pitfalls from 8 years of doing embedded Android projects in different setups and sizes.

Presented at

• inovex Meetup, Erlangen, 2023
• Embedded Open Source Summit, Praha, 2023

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