We should build as much Android tools as possible from source. The most relevant tool is probably the adb (Android Debug Bridge) to communicate with Android phones.

Reason

The official builds from Google are distributed under an unfree license (see #53403).

Difficulty

Probably high.

Resources

• References:
  • Debian efforts: AndroidTools
  • Arch package: android-tools
• adb (and other Android tools)
  • Requires a custom build system: Soong
    • Not in Nixpkgs yet -> wee need a package and an abstraction for building packages with Soong first.
    • Official documentation: https://source.android.com/setup/build
  • Source-code: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/adb/+/refs/heads/master
• Android Studio
  • Official documentation: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/base/+/studio-master-dev/source.md
  • Tried it once (all information IIRC, without any guarantees), the build required a gitRepo checkout of ~40GB. Then there are multiple steps involved (without much documentation), but the the build itself was working. The main problem problem is to put all results back together (IntelliJ IDEA, the Android "plugin", and the Android Gradle plugin). And we also don't build IntelliJ IDEA from source so that might be a problem as well.