Building Android 11 for PH-1 on Apple Silicon

3 min readDec 13, 2020

This process should work on Intel.

This article is based on:

“Building Android O with a Mac” by Christopher Ney https://medium.com/@christopherney/building-android-o-with-a-mac-da07e8bd94f9

Official Android documentation: https://source.android.com/setup/requirements

“Essential Products: device_essential_mata” by Jean-Baptiste Théou and Gary Bisson https://github.com/EssentialOpenSource/device_essential_mata

My Environment

Device: MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
OS: macOS Big Sur 11.1 (20C69)
Chip: Apple M1
Memory: 16GB
Device: Essential PH-1(mata)

Install Xcode and Tools

Install Xcode from the Mac Appstore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id497799835?mt=12
Install Xcode command line tools with:

$ xcode-select --install

Install Rosetta with:

$ /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta

Creating a case-sensitive disk image

Case sensitive volume of 350GB with the following command line:

$ hdiutil create -type SPARSE -fs 'Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+' -size 350g ~/forest.dmg

Configure ZSH

Create and edit the .zsh_env file with the following code:

nano ~/.zshenv

Paste into the file

# set the number of open files to be 2048ulimit -S -n 2048# Compiler cacheexport USE_CCACHE=1# Mount the Android Treefunction mountForest { hdiutil attach ~/forest.dmg.sparseimage -mountpoint /Volumes/Forest; }#Unmount the Android Treefunction umountForest() { hdiutil detach /Volumes/Forest; }
export PATH="/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH"export PATH=~/.bin:$PATH

Download AOSP source code

We will be using android 11.0.0 r3 to match the mata opensource project. https://github.com/EssentialOpenSource/device_essential_mata

$ source ~/.zshenv
$ mkdir ~/.bin
$ curl https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/.bin/repo
$ chmod a+x ~/.bin/repo
$ mountForest
$ cd /Volumes/Forest
$ mkdir aosp_mata
$ cd aosp_mata

$ git config --global user.name "Your Name"
$ git config --global user.email "you@example.com"

$ repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b android-11.0.0_r3$ repo sync

Add the Mata repo (Steps are only needed for PH-1)

$ mkdir -p device/essential$ cd device/essential$ git clone https://github.com/EssentialOpenSource/device_essential_mata.git mata$ cd ../../

Revert “sepolicy: support /system_ext and /product mapping files”

BOARD_SEPOLICY_VERS := 29.0 doesn’t build and without it the wrong mapping (1000) is created and 29.0 one is empty. We will revert this change for now.

$ cd system/sepolicy
$ git revert 61178550157fce18861ddd59fa9a6a29cf06c583
$ cd ../../

Download the vendor prebuilt for mata

$ cd device/essential/mata
$ curl -o vendor.zip "https://storage.googleapis.com/essential-static/vendor-QQ1A.200105.088.zip"$ unzip vendor.zip
$ rm -f vendor.zip
$ cd ../../../

Fix the Build for OS X

Correct the SDK version

Download and uncompress the exact missing Mac SDK “10.15” version into the following directory:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/

Download Mac SDKs: https://github.com/phracker/MacOSX-SDKs/releases

Correct the PAGE_SIZE error in Big Sur

Edit system/core/base/cmsg.cpp

Add a line to the file. “size_t psize = getpagesize();”

namespace base {size_t psize = getpagesize();ssize_t SendFileDescriptorVector(borrowed_fd sockfd, const void* data, size_t len,

Replace the two instances of PAGE_SIZE with psize

if (cmsg_space >= psize) {

Build AOSP

$ source build/envsetup.sh
$ lunch mata-userdebug
$ make -j4

Final output should look like this!

[100% 48449/48449] Install system fs image: out/target/product/mata/system.img

#### build completed successfully (03:31:26 (hh:mm:ss)) ####

Flash to Device

Add the google platform-tools to your machine.

https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platform-tools

I extracted the folder to ~/.bin to keep things clean.

$ nano ~/.zshenv