Android Development Toolkit: Nexus OS image distribution question

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
22,939
13,024
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This question is probably covered in the EULA for the various components of the Android Development Toolkit (ADT), but I didn't read every line which is what most people do, I suppose.

ADT comes bundled with an emulator (QEMU?) and some OS images of various generic phones and Nexus phones (Nexus 4, 5, 7, 7(2012), and 10, and one or two others I can't remember). So far as I know, this is all free-to-use for development purposes.

My question is: is it possible to legally distribute an Android app (freemium) to non-Android customers bundled with QEMU and one of the images supplied with the ADT package? My guess would be "No", or "Not without negotiating some kind of licensing fee with Google for the use of their images", never mind the GPLed nature of QEMU which is another matter altogether.

I still ask, because I could be very wrong about this, depending on the nature of the ADT license.

Mods, if you would rather move this to the Operating System forum, that'd be fine, but I think this question is pertinent to anyone interested in using Google's development toolkit.
 

TerryMathews

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,464
2
0
Why not write a script/installer to pull the relevant files out of the SDK upon installation?

If there is a license issue, doing this should side step it.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
22,939
13,024
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It could be done that way, and I think that would be a workable solution. Alternatively, something similar could be done with Genymotion, which is apparently much faster than the emulation done through ADT.

In either case, a custom installer could just download the publicly-available files and handle things from there (in case the end user doesn't want to do that manually). So yeah, that would work.

edit: hmm, doing this with Genymotion might be a problem unless the script/installer hooks into a signup for their cloud service. Might be better to just stick with the ADT package.
 
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