How do I build the Android SDK with hidden and internal APIs available?

I want to rebuild the Android SDK (or rather only the android.jar) to include hidden and internal APIs.

I could not find any documentation or discussion doing on how to go about this. I have an Ubuntu CyanogenMod build environment already setup that is able to build cm7.

Now, I read that make SDK will build the SDK but I want to build an SDK that includes methods and fields that are marked as hidden using @hide. Is this possible?

What I want to do is make changes to an application that uses hidden API and in order to rebuild it I would like to use the modified SDK.

Solution 1:

This is what I always do to use hidden api.

1. Build the repo or download jars from https://sites.google.com/site/hippunosource/home/android/androidnohide-apiwo-shi-yongsuru-rifurekushonha-wei-shi-yong
2. copy out out/target/common/obj/JAVA_LIBRARIES/framework_intermediates/classes.jar (better to rename it as something like framework_all.jar)
3. config your project build path-->libraries --> add this external jars. In Order and Export, move it up and before android.jar

Solution 2:

I have done some investigating into this, and my conclusion is simply: This cannot be done without quite a bit of work. Read the rest of this answer for details on what I have found.

android.jar is actually comprised of the "public api" of framework.jar and core.jar which is found in system/frameworks/ on the device. android.jar is a kind of what I would call Java library header, all implementation in the actual byte code are just a throw new RuntimeException("stub");, this allows you to build against android.jar (e.g. in Eclipse), but execution has to be performed on a device or emulator.

The public API of the Android SDK is defined by classes/methods/fields that are not prefixed with the @{hide} javadoc annotation. I.e. everything that is not annotated is included in the SDK.

android.jar is built from the sources located in out/target/common/obj/JAVA_LIBRARIES/android_stubs_current_intermediates which itself is generated by the tool DroidDoc located in build/tools/droiddoc.

DroidDoc is the tool (probably adapted from javadoc, or using javadoc) that generate the actual Android SDK documentation. As a side-effect, and probably because it is already parsing all the javadoc, it also spews out the android stubs which are then compiled into the android.jar which is distributed in the SDK.

So to include the stuff that is hidden you could, if you only want to include specific parts, just remove the @hide annotation and rebuild the SDK.

However if you want to include all the hidden parts things get a lot more complicated. You can modify DroidDoc (the relevant source is in build/tools/droiddoc/src/Stubs.java) such that nothing is detected as hidden. This is quite trivial and I have tried this, however the stubs that is then generated does not compile at all.

My conclusion by now is that this is simply not feasible. The stubs generated if you remove the part of DroidDoc that detect hidden annotations, is simply not compilable, and would require quite a bit of work to compile correctly.

So my answer to your questions is: No, this cannot be done, without doing a lot of work. Sorry.

A side note about the mkstubs tool. mkstubs are used when you build a SDK addon, i.e. the addons you can find in the Android SDK manager from vendors, e.g. Samsung providing you with an additional API for stuff specific to Samsung phones. mkstubs does much the same as the DroidDoc stubs generation process, however it does not use @hide annotations, it uses a .defs file describing which packages/classes/fields to include or exclude from your SDK addon.

However this is all irrelevant to the question, as the Android SDK build does not use the mkstubs tool. (Unfortunately.)

Solution 3:

We could reconstruct the *.jar files from the Android platform.

First, connect ADB to your device. Then run:

adb pull /system/framework/core.jar .
adb pull /system/framework/framework.jar .

The core.jar contain the standard Java libraries (java.*) and the framework.jar contain the Android libraries (android.*). This is not usable yet, as the actual files are in DEX format, not JAR format.

We could convert these DEX-formatted *.jars into real JARs using tools such as dex2jar:

dex2jar core.jar
dex2jar framework.jar

Then pull in these jars using "Add External JARs..." (assuming you're using Eclipse ADT)

• right click on Project → Properties → Java Build Path → Libraries → Add External JARs... → (Choose the core-dex2jar.jar and framework-dex2jar.jar from above).

This will enable you to use the internal and some Java 7 APIs. (The generated APK, as far as I can see, does not contain any actual code from the JARs.)

Solution 4:

You can download the modified android.jar to be used as hidden APIs from this repository. Follow the instructions there.