Android

KDE Software on Android

Android is currently the mobile platform regarding market share and number of provided applications. Hence, it is a platform very well suited to increase the availability and usage of applications by the KDE community.

Contact

For questions and discussion around KDE software on Android join our Matrix channel and mailing list.

Getting Applications

Stable releases for our Android apps are available on Google Play and F-Droid.

Nightly test builds can be found in the Nightly F-Droid repo.

Build Environment

There are different ways to setup a build environment:

1. Use Ready-to-Build Docker Container with Craft - This is the most convenient way to setup a system. It also brings the advantage to have a clear separation between your Linux build system and your cross-compile system; in particularly when you require several cross-compiled libraries for your application.
2. Setup your Build Environment Manually - This tutorial for setting up the cross-compiling environment requires considerably more time and brings the disadvantage to make no clear separation between your system and the cross-compile environment.
3. DEPRECATED Use Ready-to-Build Docker Container with android tooling - This works very similar to using Craft since it uses a docker environment too. However the tooling is now deprecated and no longer supported. You should use Craft in a container instead.

You can also get the binaries from binary-factory.kde.org. Here's some explanation about how it works:

https://community.kde.org/Android/BinaryFactory

Building

The following examples do not apply if you use Craft to build the software.

Example: Building Marble

cd /opt/android
git clone kde:marble
mkdir marble/build
cd marble/build
cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/PATH/TO/ECM/toolchain/Android.cmake -DECM_ADDITIONAL_FIND_ROOT_PATH=${Qt5_android} -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../export  ..
make install/strip

Note:

• /PATH/TO/ECM/toolchain/Android.cmake must be replaced with the actual path to toolchain/Android.cmake, if using the docker image it probably is at /opt/android/kde/install/share/ECM/toolchain/Android.cmake
• make install/strip strips build symbols from the binaries and reduces sizes considerably

Building with KDESRC-BUILD

For building the below mentioned frameworks on Android, you can use the following kdesrc-buildrc config file:

cd /opt/android
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/cordlandwehr/kdesrc-conf-android.git
mkdir -p extragear/kdesrc-build
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdesrc-build extragear/kdesrc-build
ln -s extragear/kdesrc-build/kdesrc-build kdesrc-build
ln -s kdesrc-conf-android/kdesrc-buildrc kdesrc-buildrc
./kdesrc-build extra-cmake-modules frameworks-android

Packaging and Deployment of APKs

See ECM Android Toolchain documentation.

KDE Frameworks 5 & Third Party Libraries

KDE Frameworks 5

• supported frameworks are listed at [1]

Third Party Libraries

• libintl-lite: is required for KI18n, since BIONIC does not fully support gettext

Further References

References:

• Phabricator Project
• Extra-CMake-Modules Toolchain: API documentation

Application specific build instructions:

• Marble: build instructions

Blog posts about building for Android (careful: instructions may be outdated)

• 2015-09 - Dennis Nienhüser: Announcing Marble Maps for Android Open Beta
• 2015-04 - Péterffy Gábor: Marble is coming to Android
• 2015-01 - GCompris Devels: GCompris is now released on Android
• 2014-06 - Aleix Pol: KDE Software on Android