Will Android run on the Raspberry PI? [closed]

Question

There's so much power in this little beast it seems a great fit for Android - yet there's not much discussion anywhere regarding an Android port to it. Anyone know more?

Answer 1

There's a discussion about it in the forums. http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/features-and-requests/android-for-pi?value=android&type=1&include=3&search=1&ret=all

The end result is that some versions might be able to:

The consensus in the forum is that Ice Cream Sandwich requires too much CPU and RAM to be able to run on the Raspi. Some of the older versions might work at an acceptable speed.

However, no such effort has been invested:

As I have said before, if someone want[s] to put Android on the Pi they are more than welcome. It won't be easy, and the benefits are pretty small for the effort involved.

And is viewed as some as simply being outside the scope of the Pi, meaning there will be little foundation support:

Android simply does not further the goals of the foundation – it"s totally orthogonal to them. It is an OS designed for passive consumption of media and targetted advertising delivery.

Answer 2

From the Raspberry Pi FAQ:

Will it run Android?

If someone in the community can port a version of Android to work with 256MB of RAM, then it’ll run on the Raspberry Pi.

Given this typical snapshot of memory usage:

  PID      Vss      Rss      Pss      Uss  cmdline
 1217   36848K   35648K   17983K   13956K  system_server
 1276   32200K   32200K   14048K   10116K  android.process.acore
 1189   26920K   26920K    9293K    5500K  zygote
 1321   20328K   20328K    4743K    2344K  android.process.media
 1356   20360K   20360K    4621K    2148K  com.android.email
 1303   20184K   20184K    4381K    1724K  com.android.settings
 1271   19888K   19888K    4297K    1764K  com.android.inputmethod.latin
 1332   19560K   19560K    3993K    1620K  com.android.alarmclock
 1187    5068K    5068K    2119K    1476K  /system/bin/mediaserver
 1384     436K     436K     248K     236K  procrank
    1     212K     212K     200K     200K  /init
  753     572K     572K     171K     136K  /system/bin/rild
  748     340K     340K     163K     152K  /system/bin/sh
  751     388K     388K     156K     140K  /system/bin/vold
 1215     148K     148K     136K     136K  /sbin/adbd
  757     352K     352K     117K      92K  /system/bin/dbus-daemon
  760     404K     404K     104K      80K  /system/bin/keystore
  759     312K     312K     102K      88K  /system/bin/installd
  749     288K     288K      96K      84K  /system/bin/servicemanager
  752     244K     244K      71K      60K  /system/bin/debuggerd

You can see the top four processes (Android system) account for some 80M (Pss/shared and Uss/process) straight up, without running any applications. Typical small applications will use another 2M or so each.

And I think this is from Android 2.2 - later versions are likely to have a larger footprint still.

Most of the processes at the end of that list are Linux ones rather than Android and you can see they have far less of an impact.

So, even if you could fit Android in (and I don't doubt some wag will give it a shot), it still seems unlikely to me. The devices are targeting two totally different markets.

Even the cheapest Android tablets and phones are still well into the hundreds of dollars and they have a fair chunk of memory capable of running that OS. My Iconia A500, for example, has 32G to play around with, 128 times as much memory as the Pi model B.

The price point of the Pi, at $35 for the "top of the line" model, puts it in a totally different market place.

The stated aim of the foundation includes:

We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

It is for this reason that I will be buying a couple for my kids. I've long used (basic) Python to teach programming to children and the inclusion of this into Raspberry Pi is a real winner in my opinion.