
Ask HN: Does anyone compile Android from source? - alistproducer2
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&#x27;t have a machine capable of building it and also no experience compiling large projects.<p>1.) would anyone be willing to build M or N for a 626s?<p>2.) if not, what&#x27;s your experience been building Android?
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lovelearning
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)

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Someone1234
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.

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lnalx
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-
bui...](http://xda-university.com/as-a-developer/getting-started-building-
android-from-source)

