Forking Android considered harmful

If you want to use Android for your custom project, then you are almost inevitably going to have to modify the platform code. Typical reasons include supporting specialised hardware, running dedicated system services and pre-installing system apps. AOSP, and some parts of the Board Support Packages, are open source, so what's stopping you just changing the bits you need to? Indeed, this is the standard development model for Android platforms: fork; modify; repeat. Of course, we all know that forking is bad but there isn't any choice, especially when it is so difficult up merge changes upstream

Well, maybe there is a choice, In this talk we will examine the problems created by simply forking Android, and we will look at various ways to make the process more maintainable. In particular we will look at using local_manifests, and at maintaining out of tree patches for AOSP. In the latter case, we will talk about the tooling required to track patch sets ("layers") and the dependencies between them.

We hope that this will spark a conversation in the community through which we can establish best practice for maintaining custom Android systems without forking