this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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I'm not an Android developer, but I plan to learn this along with the Kotlin language. The Android Studio seems to have proprietary components and therefore marked as non-FOSS on Flathub store. The Android SDK specifically (at least builds provided by Google) is also seems to be licensed under non-FOSS license.

Android Studio is a powerful IDE with rich toolbox for Android development, but it feels like strong lock-in on closed technology even in case we have Android as a FOSS platform in face of AOSP.

I'm just curious to learn, is Android development can be setup to be 100% FOSS? What environment, toolchain, and editors like IntelliJ IDEA CE/VSCodium/Neovim we can possibly use to achieve this?

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[–] apparia@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I've also just started learning Android dev, avoiding Android Studio. So far I've followed this blog and have a Java "Hello World" app building out of a makefile (without even Gradle!), but using the Google SDK and build tools.

I believe the build tools are FOSS, but I didn't know that about the SDK; just searching now Replicant has some links to FOSS SDK-related things but that page hasn't been updated in 2 years and nothing seems very easy. Would be interested to hear if you manage to get a FOSS version working.