

Ask HN: Hacking Android, what's out there? - old-gregg

I'm thinking about getting an Android phone, either Nexus One or Motorola's Droid. I'm a programmer and I have a few ideas in mind, absolutely non-commercial, personal little hacks.<p>I have absolutely zero interest in their official Java-based SDK. Google's front page on Android development stinks XML at me. I can comprehend Android idea only from "Linux in my pocket" point of view, and that's the kind of tinkering/development I have in mind (taking existing unix apps/utils and porting useful parts of them to run on mobile devices).<p>Where to go? I tried searching Google but the Internet is just filled with SDK/NDK blog posts targeting commercial developers.<p>If one wants to hack on mobile Linux, is Android a viable platform? And if so, there must be a community around it, where do those people hang out?
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nuclear_eclipse
The one thing to keep in mind here is that beyond the modified Linux kernel,
there's not much if anything about Android that looks like a "traditional"
Linux distro. Android has recreated a whole new userland toolchain on top of
the kernel, centered around Dalvik (Androids' JVM). If you want a more
traditional Linux system to tinker with, buy a N900 instead, which comes with
a Maemo Linux distro.

Most Android development in the actual OS level seems to be based around
patches to the AOSP codebase. Cyanogen has created a github repo with his
build environment/overlay, which supposedly should allow you to start hacking
on the internals, and then build/flash that new image to your phone. Building
on top of that, the NDK will at least allow you to write Androids apps in
C/C++ that could potentially hook into any changes you make to the core OS
build, and would give you the most options for tinkering how you like.

I'd recommend the Nexus One for any Android OS work though, as Google made it
trivial to gain root access from the bootloader and flash your own image to
the system. If you really don't like T-Mobile, you could always wait a bit
longer for Google to start selling the Nexus One in CDMA format for VZW.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Someone (Mark Pilgrim?) recently pointed out that Android is so divorced from
standard "Linux" once you get above the kernel that it's relatively easy to
have a completely separate debian that sits alongside Android without much
overlap.

If it is just personal hacks then that might be a way forward.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Yes, that's true, but because Android uses a completely new/private windowing
system, none of your Debian-based applications can access either the
framebuffer or the windowing system, so you'd be completely limited to running
CLI packages. The best this would really offer is the ability to run an SSH
daemon on the phone that you could access from a remote system, although be
careful to avoid the iPhone SSH / root password vulnerabilities...

