AndroidTerminology

Android SDK Terminology

A download of the Android platform source code contains a build system that can delivery many artifacts. The following diagram
shows an overview of some of these deliveries.
Typical deliveries for the platform

We need terms for these components

Android SDK

The word “Android SDK” is polluted as this term has been used to various combinations of the terms defined bellow.
“SDK” or Software Development Kit is the complete set of tools

SDK Starter Package

The Android SDK Starter Pacakge contains the basic generic set of tools needed to do Android development. These include:

• tools/android. A binary that allows you to manage the android SDK environement
  • Create Android projects
  • Create Android virtual devices
  • Download android Platform-x components
  • Download android SDK-addons
• tools/emulator. A quemu based ARM emulator used to emulate Android devices
• tools/apkbuilder. The tool used to create Android application packages.

Android Platform-SDK

An Android Platform-SDK consists of a set components that represent a certain Android version.
replaced with a version.

• android.jar. A reference APIs that represents the exported APIs of a platform
• images/system.img. A disk-image containing the Android main file system (rootfs), Java virtual machine init
• tools/aapt a tool to Package the android resources into APK files
• Documentation

SDK-addon

A SDK-addon represents a way for a party to delivery additional APIs to a user.

• vendor.jar (additional java API)
• images/system.img. A disk-image containing the Android main file system (rootfs), Java virtual machine init and the additional APIs that are installed
• Documentation
• Meta information about the contained SDK Platform Android
• NO android.jar, No SDK Platform Android documentation.