Embedded Open Source Summit 2023

In our community, building embedded systems based on Linux, e.g. with Yocto or buildroot, is standard and well known. Considering Android, respectively the AOSP as a base system feels strange at the beginning as it is a huge ecosystem that implies high system requirements. Of course, embedded Android is not a solution for each issue. Nevertheless, the AOSP provides a sophisticated base platform which is packed with a - modern UI stack - robust media and camera implementation - modern AI runtime - well known abstraction between system and app development - energy optimization and lots of other helpful infrastructure. This makes AOSP an interesting approach for building more complex embedded systems. A first goal of this talk is to show in which situations choosing AOSP over a plain Linux system really adds value and where not. But where to start and how are the best workflows? The AOSP is a massive and complex code base with a few hundred GB of source code. Navigating the sources, finding the right place to do changes and working with several code repositories at once is a tough task at the beginning. Thus, the second goal of this talk is to share best practices and hints to avoid lots of pitfalls from 8 years of doing embedded Android projects in different setups and sizes.