The aosp-devs reference library

This is a list of useful presentations, blogs, books, etc, organized by topic - just like a library

Rules for adding to the library

If you know of something that you think should be included here, please create a pull request against reference.md. There are a few criteria for an item to be added. It must:

• Relate to open source software
• Describe something concrete and with a reasonable shelf life. News items or opinion pieces will not be accepted.
• Be useful

APEX

• Using Vendor APEX in AOSP (Renjith Rajagopal, March 2025) slides video

Automotive

• App developers and Android Automotive OS (Al Sutton, January 2023) slides video
• Swimming towards a Software Defined Architecture with Android Trout (Isaac Trefz, September 2022) slides video

Binder

• Binder RPC - AIDL for distributed systems (David Brazdil, July 2023) slides video

Books

• Android Internals - A Confectioner’s CookBook (or better books) (Jonathan Levi, 2015 to 2025) link to book
• Inside the Android OS: Building, Customizing, Managing and Operating Android System Services (G. Blake Meike, Larry Schiefer, 2021) link to book
• Android System Programming: Porting, customizing, and debugging Android HAL (Roger Ye, 2017) link to book
• Learning Embedded Android N Programming (Ivan Morgillo, Stefano Viola, 2016) link to book
• Embedded Programming with Android: Bringing Up an Android System from Scratch (Roger Ye, 2015) link to book
• Android Security Internals: An In-Depth Guide to Android’s Security Architectur (Nikolay Elenkov, 2014) link to book
• Embedded Android (Karim Yaghmour, 2013) link to book

Booting

• Android bootflow: experiments with U-Boot and GBL (BayLibre, January 2025) blog

Debugging

• Browsing and debugging framework code using Android Studio (Chris Simmonds, May 2022) slides video

Embedded Android

• Working with custom Android devices (Erik Hellman, November 2023) slides video
• Devboard maintenance in AOSP (Amit Pundir, March 2023) slides video

Kiosk

• Exploring Android Kiosk Variants (Igor Kalkov-Streitz, January 2025) slides video

Logging

• aminilog – AOSP styled logging macros for NDK projects (Stefan Lengfeld, January 2024) video github

SELinux and security

• SELinux in Android: How it works and how it’s used to make Android more secure (Alan Stokes, January 2024) slides video
• Debugging SEPolicy (Chris Simmonds, November 2023) slides video
• The Android Platform Security Model (2023) (René Mayrhofer, Dianne Hackborn, et al) research paper

Tracing

• Adventures with Systrace - measure and investigate the glass to glass latency in Android (Stefan Lengfeld, November 2023) slides video