How to build Android without the phone application?

Question

i'm trying to get android running on a gumstix overo system. since i'm not planning to use the final "product" as a phone, i asked my self if it is possible to exclude applications like the phone/dialer-app from the kernel build-process (any config parameter probably?)

Answer 1

Just remove (or comment) these lines:

<project path="packages/apps/Phone" name="platform/packages/apps/Phone" /> <project path="packages/apps/VoiceDialer" name="platform/packages/apps/VoiceDialer" />
(and others if needed) from the platform manifest (default.xml) :

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest/+/master/default.xml

Answer 2

Removing the app declarations in the repo manifest did not work for me, as there are other libraries that reference them that then fail to compile. The build system approach to this problem is to create/modify your product definition makefile to not include the specific apps.

So, for the overo you probably already have a products/overo.mk product file. You can manually set the PRODUCT_PACKAGES variable to which applications you want to ship. You will also want to take a look at the PRODUCT_POLICY variable, as it defines sets of applications for your product type.

It can take some fiddling to get everything to build correctly, due to interdependencies between applications, but the Android build output does a pretty good job of explaining the problems when they arise.