I am using nix to build android applications to be sure that it is being built safely from the source code to the apk file.

Why though? Why not just use google play or even f-droid?

I love nix and being able to build my packages and even my operating system in a pure and reproducible way is awesome. I want that for my android devices. But i find the state of development in the android worse than python 😭🙏.

Goals:

• Collect the list of open source famous android applications and games.
• Create a derivation that builds those applications (also tests them if possible)
• Use that derivation to generate the APK.
• Then collect these APKs in a cache that could be used to serve those applications inside a static website.
• Check my own packages for reproducibility.
  • Get the list of all our dependencies for builds of all apks
  • Check them for reproducibility
  • Check our all derivations for reproducibility
• No runtime dependencies (we are just producing a file)

Applications:

• lichess
• signal
• tailscale
• wikipedia
• f-droid
• mihon
• mastodon
• anki
• bluesky-social/social-app
• smoking-durtles

Successful nix apk builds:

• https://github.com/CrazyChaoz/Minimal-Android-UWB-App
• https://github.com/iyox-studios/iyox-Wormhole
• https://github.com/expenses/irohdroid
• https://github.com/nix-community/robotnix/tree/master/apks/chromium
• 463c3f6606/apks/fdroid
• https://github.com/SpiralP/mobile_nebula

Important tools:

• https://github.com/CrazyChaoz/gradle-dot-nix : This flake can generate the full maven repo required to build a gradle app from gradle/verification-metadata.xml, all in the sandbox, without code generation.