Android

General Pages

• android.com, with phones and links.
• Android on Wikipedia, clearly a popular topic.

Android Development

These are resource you'd care about the most as an application developer.

• Android API Reference
• Jetpack Reference
• NDK Reference
• Android Developer page.
• Android Developers Blog, announcements and a little bit of everything.
• Android on GitHub has many repositories and projects for LLVM and NDKs.

AOSP Development

These are resources you'd care about the most if you were building for a new device.

• Code Search
• Android Open Source Project homepage, or AOSP for short.
• Architecture
• Graphics has a lot of information but given how I care about this kind of stuff, you should expect to see me add more things.

Languages

Java and Kotlin are the two main managed languages. C/C++ is also used in various places, of course, and more recently Rust.

• Java 8 support on Android (hello lambdas!)
• Java versions in Android builds is a bit of a mess, honestly.
• JNI spec, the Java Native Interface.
• Kotlin docs
• Kotlin on Android

Graphics

• Graphics documentation center on AOSP.
• Android Graphics Shading Language for use with RuntimeShader.
• OpenGL ES, an old classic.
• Skia Shaders Playground, to run sksl aka Android Shader Language.
• How to capture an SKP file from the Android Frameork, which you can debug with the visualizer.

Android UI

Android UI has been around for a pretty long time. Not "USER/GDI"-long, but long enough that is has undergone some pretty important enhancements and a number of attempts at being replaced with other frameworks.

I'll add some Compose resources at some point, and maybe cross-reference some Jetpack content as well. But for now, here are the main official documentation pages, as well as a number of Google videos on various aspects of Views-based development.

• Documentation on layouts, themes, various controls, drawables and images, and more.
• Animations and Transitions
• Touch and Input
• Notifications
• Google I/O 2008 - Inside the Android Application Framework
• Google I/O 2009 - Make your Android UI Fast and Efficient
• Google I/O 2010 - The world of ListView
• Google I/O 2010 - Android UI design patterns
• Google I/O 2013 - Writing Custom Views for Android
• Google I/O 2014 - Material science: Developing Android applications with material design
• Android Performance Patterns: Android UI and the GPU
• Android Performance Patterns: Understanding Overdraw
• Custom Views and Performance (100 Days of Google Dev)
• Drawn out: How Android renders (Google I/O '18)
• Modern Android development: Android Jetpack, Kotlin, and more (Google I/O 2018)
• Android Graphics from Dev Summit '22 (low-latency graphics via front-buffer rendering, RenderEffect, blurs, SurfaceView vs TextureView, AGSL, demos)

Code Injection

AOSP builds can take a while. For better or for worse, it can sometimes be easier to just inject something if you have a running system.

• The Definitive Guide to Linux Process Injection
• Linux process injection with ptrace - Simple C example
• Code injection on Android without ptrace

Posts

• My Android posts include a few that I reference regularly.
• Rendering on Android
• Logging Without Headers

Tools

• Overview
• Perfetto, the tool of choice to collect and visualize data, although eBPF-based toolsa are getting better and better rapidly.

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