Source availability
Decide how you want to contribute by matching your skills to the code.
All the packages in this Roundup are derived from open source, so finding the source code should be easy.
This is not always the case. Anything from Google has two branches: one for internal development and one for the public. Google does this so it can keep new features secret until the day they’re delivered. Regular developers or hopefuls can use the public branch to send in patches. In this section we look at what programming language is used and if the tree is available for download. We also check the size of the source tree. Remember that the tree for one package is usually on top of the kernel source code and the development tools.
Android’s entire tree is available at www.source.android.com. The package, which includes the dev toolkit, is around 10GB, but it is prudent to have 20GB available. This package is the standard, but it’s also big, so make sure you have enough resources on your machine to use it.
Android_x86 is 4.5MB in size, on top of the kernel tree. The project uses mostly c++ and is scripting mostly with shell. This project is most interesting when you want to run Android on other devices, not if you want to test apps for mobiles.
Anbox has a small source download of 1.5MB, and programming is mostly in c++. If you want to learn container technology, you can take on some tasks in this project since that’s what they use. If you’re serious about learning about the most important technology in use at the moment, this is one to look for. Anbox is hosted on GitHub.
Genymotion implements their own code in c++ and most of its scripting uses Perl. They’re using a modified kernel for the virtual machines. Their source code download is 135MB.
The Shashlik code seems to be mostly abandoned, but it’s still available on Github. There’s even a fork that was updated during 2017, so there’s still hope. Someone else has made a Docker file to make it possible to run it with docker containers. The download is 6MB, and programming has been made using c++, and c. Scripts are mostly written in Python.