Inside the Android OS

The Complete Guide to Customizing Android for New IoT and Embedded Devices

Inside the Android OS is a comprehensive guide and reference for technical professionals who want to customize and integrate Android into embedded devices, and construct or maintain successful Android-based products. Replete with code examples, it encourages you to create your own working code as you read---whether for personal insight or a professional project in the fast-growing marketplace for smart IoT devices.

Expert Android developers G. Blake Meike and Larry Schiefer respond to the real-world needs of embedded and IoT developers moving to Android. After presenting an accessible introduction to the Android environment, they guide you through boot, subsystem startup, hardware interfaces, and application support---offering essential knowledge without ever becoming obscure or overly specialized.

Reflecting Android's continuing evolution, Meike and Schiefer help you take advantage of relevant innovations, from the ART application runtime environment to Project Treble. Throughout, a book-length project covers all you need to start implementing your own custom Android devices, one step at a time.

You will:

• Assess advantages and tradeoffs using Android in smart IoT devices
• Master practical processes for customizing Android
• Set up a build platform, download the AOSP source, and build an Android image
• Explore Android's components, architecture, source code, and development tools
• Understand essential kernel modules that are unique to Android
• Use Android's extensive security infrastructure to protect devices and users
• Walk through Android boot, from power-on through system initialization
• Explore subsystem startup, and use Zygote containers to control application processes
• Interface with hardware through Android's Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)
• Provide access to Java programs via Java Native Interface (JNI)
• Gain new flexibility by using binderized HAL (Project Treble)
• Implement native C/C++ or Java client apps without bundling vendor libraries

Blake Meike is a passionate engineer, code poet, and veteran of more than 10 years of Android development at organizations including D2, Realm, Twitter, and Cyanogen. As a teacher, he has trained hundreds of new Android developers. He is author of several books on Android development, including O’Reilly’s bestselling Programming Android and Addison-Wesley’s Android Concurrency. He holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Dartmouth College and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Larry Schiefer is the CTO and co-founder of HIQES, LLC, a mobile platform and app engineering services company. He has made a career out of creating software solutions for mobile, embedded, and desktop systems. He started his career at Motorola working on large area telecommunications systems then moved to startups in the telecommunications, networking, and embedded spaces. Digging into Android’s internals was a natural progression with his background in telecommunications, embedded systems, and Linux kernel work. He has traveled around the world training engineers at Intel, Qualcomm, Bose, and others about the internal workings of Android. In addition to being an entrepreneur and technical leader, he continues to stay involved with the development of new software and platform solutions.