About Android

The Mobile OS

Android is a mobile operating system - it includes features that make it easier to use applications on mobile devices, such as phones and tablets. Mobile devices and applications face a remarkably large and complex set of requirements. Most embedded products face some of these challenges, but mobile devices are perhaps unique in facing so many. They include:

Not Only for Mobile Devices

Most people are familiar with Android on phones and tablets. But a device does not need to be “mobile” to face many of the challenges that Android addresses.

It is worth considering using Android if your product has a high resolution screen and requires direct user input (buttons or touchscreen). The more mobile-like properties your device has, the more likely Android is to be a good choice.

With our experience of Android, embedded Linux and low-level RTOSs we can work with you to choose the most effective platform for your product.

More Than Just an OS

Android is much more than an operating system, it is an entire hardware and software ecosystem. When you choose to develop an Android based product you benefit from:

• A huge amount of support from component manufacturers, including:

  • Android Board Support Packages for development kits and reference designs

  • Android device drivers and HAL support

  • Android-specific example code and technical support

• A global community of developers

• Widely used build systems and test frameworks

• A vast Open Source software library

• Frequent security updates and bug fixes

  • Google does the hard work of monitoring changes to all the components that make up recent versions of Android and determines which changes are important

  • Google publishes the latest set of security and bug fix patches every month

AOSP - The Android Open Source Project

AOSP is the foundation of Android. Companies such as Google and Samsung start with AOSP and add their own secret sauce to their Android products.

The Android products that most of us are familiar with are more than AOSP. They all include the Google Mobile Services (GMS) package. GMS includes Google Maps, the Google Play Store, Chrome mobile browser, Integrated Google search and much more. Anyone can use AOSP, but to include GMS there are a number of regulatory, test, certification and licensing hurdles that must be negotiated with Google.

GMS is really a requirement if your product is a mass-market consumer device, where the user expects to have access to those Google services it provides. If the product “Has to be Android”, rather than just Android-like, then you will need GMS.

Typically, the sorts of products we are involved with do not need GMS. AOSP is used because it solves many of the technical issues faced by the product, not because the product “Has to be Android”.

Using Android In Your Product

Many hardware vendors provide a version of Android that runs on a development kit or reference design. This is an essential starting point but it is only the very first step in developing your product.

The Android kernel makes use of the Linux kernel, but Android is very different to a typical Linux based embedded system. It is common for experienced Linux developers, believing the two systems to be similar, to start on an Android project only to find themselves facing a very steep learning-curve.

Rather than spending development time on getting Android working on your hardware, you want to focus your time on making your application work well. We can help with both of these areas.

Android applications are almost always written in Java but use an Android-specific Java Runtime Environment. This is something your developers will need to become familiar with.

You can write application code in C/C++ and other languages, but you will need to use the Android NDK (Native code Development Kit) to integrate this code into a Java application.

Specialist platform services and high performance code are usually written in C/C++ with an NDK Java class interface provided so that Java application code can make use of them. It can be a little tricky to design an NDK interface that makes it easier to write the Java code. A lot of experience is needed to ensure the interface is efficient and correctly manages Java object lifetimes.

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