Show HN: Gradle-less APK builds on Android

1 point

8 months ago

without access to a pc, i still wanted to build android apps on my phone. this meant i needed to find a way to do it without android studio, on a cli. the internet said that was easy, use gradle with android sdk cli tools. turns out gradle and android sdk relies on official x86 binaries from google servers. maybe there is way to override that, and use our own cross compiled binaries, but i dont know how to do that. also i wanted as much as control as possible over the build process. this led me to create my own build script for usage in termux.

it uses a combination of ninja files and shell scripts. all the tools necessary for building the apk has already been cross compiled and remains as a package in the termux repos(thanks). the shell scripts act as a meta build system, as that builds ninja files dynamically if files have changed. this gives me free parallelism and incremental compilation (i think so). this is definetely not a general build script for all android apps. if it needs to be built by my method, there are a lot of implicit hardcoded file paths, and the biggest issue being that the apps should rely only on platform apis(the ones available in android.jar).

do note that if it wasnt obvious from my tone or my profile, i am a beginner, who has no idea what is going on, so instead of doing push requests or bug reports, i would much appreciate if you just voiced your reasons down below and start a discussion, instead of doing technical stuff on github, i am still learning on how to use all of that. this is the first project that i am showcasing on the internet(only because of my friends forced me to).