Stranger Things are afoot with Android on Raspberry Pi - "Android Things" is available

7 May 2017

I'm not sure how I managed to miss this, perhaps because it's still in 'developer preview', but a version of Android is officially available for the Raspberry Pi 3.

If you're really keen, you can download the image here for the developer preview 3.1.

Thanks to the recent release of Google's AIY Project with the latest version of the MagPi magazine (already selling for £40+ on ebay), the official guide for the project which is rumored to be on sale at a later date from Google, links to a github for running AIY Project on 'Android Things' with the aforementioned link to the developer preview.

Google also has an Android image with the AIY Project as opposed to it running on Raspbian.

It turns out there's a full site for Android Things and it runs on more than Raspberry Pi 3, it also runs on the intel Edison. However, it appears to be as 'bare bones' as the Windows 10 IoT Core, intended to be a deployment platform for apps via the adb interface. Though it likely still means that the full graphical interface could be run on it. It's not without issues though and is still very much in development:

I for one, welcome our Google overlords what're you going to make, and will this cause you to check out Android if you haven't already?

Top Comments

carmelito over 7 years ago in reply to shabaz

Thanks cstanton for the detailed post, I have been going through the links you provided for a couple of hours now, and I am going to have to try out the Intel Edison image.
And also a +1 for shabaz comment on BeagleBone
I hope they also have easy-to-use BeagleBone images at some stage too, because a lot of embedded Linux products are now using these too
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rsc over 7 years ago

Hackster.io is having an Android Things Design Contest:
https://www.hackster.io/contests/Google
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DAB over 8 years ago

Nice update.

Yes, there are some interesting devices floating around that look very capable of hacking.

DAB
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shabaz over 8 years ago in reply to cstanton

That's a good point. I guess the Google Moto Mods initiative was a way for them to test this out, that app developers could get up-to-speed with custom hardware attachments. It all makes sense now!
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cstanton over 8 years ago in reply to shabaz

Or maybe look at it another way, it bridges the gap to those whom aren't familiar with typical embedded app development, as Windows 10 IoT Core did for C# developers, so this will help Java developers to come over to embedded hardware.

Looks like it has google play services, which means it has the framework basis to run most android apps so long as they're not hardware dependent, and all it'll take is porting the APIs over, which since there are builds of Nougat for the Raspberry Pi, won't take much.

To make any GUI useful though, hardware graphics acceleration is still lacking.
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