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Android Development with 32bit Linux (Debian)

Google removed support for 32bit Linux for there build-tools for Android. Last officially supported version is 23.0.3. This version is too old for current development.

The main problem is that aapt2 is a 64bit executable and won't run on 32bit.

Lately I found a solution for this problem. You can emulate a 64bit system for exactly one executable with qemu.
But when just running it you will see the missing libraries.

Those are in /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu.

Setup

Obviously these libraries won't be found on a 32bit system because they are for 64bit. This means installing them with apt will be difficult (at least I don't know how).

  • You will need libc6, libc6-dev, zlib1g and libgcc1. You should download the deb packages for your system (64bit instead of 32bit) into a new working folder.

  • Create a folder fakeInstall in this folder.

  • Now run:

    dpkg -x libc6_2.24-11+deb9u3_amd64.deb fakeInstall
dpkg -x libc6-dev_2.24-11+deb9u3_amd64.deb fakeInstall
dpkg -x zlib1g_1.2.8.dfsg-5_amd64.deb fakeInstall
dpkg -x libgcc1_6.3.0-18+deb9u1_amd64.deb fakeInstall

    (update the versions to yours)

    This will install the packages into the fakeInstall folder.

  • Now we need to put everything into the right place:
    (attention when working with sudo!)

    sudo mv fakeInstall/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu /lib/
sudo mkdir -p /lib64
sudo mv fakeInstall/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /lib64

  • Basically the preparation is finished.
    So let's install qemu. Luckily it's in the default apt list
    (at least on debian stretch):

    sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qemu qemu-user

  • Last thing to do is to use qemu with aapt2 instead of only aapt2

    mv $ANDROID_HOME/build-tools/28.0.1/aapt2 $ANDROID_HOME/build-tools/28.0.1/_aapt2

    Now move the aapt2 script from this repo into $ANDRID_HOME/build-tools/28.0.1/ and give it execution permission by

    chmod +x $ANDROID_HOME/build-tools/28.0.1/aapt2

    If you don't have a global ANDROID_HOME variable replace it with the corresponding path.
    Replace the build-tools version with yours!

    At some installations / in newer versions you also need to replace the aapt2 in ~/.gradle/caches/transforms-*/files-*/aapt2-*-linux.jar/*/aapt2-*-linux/ like above. This is a cache which means you need to try to build it and replace it afterwards.
    The * needs to be replaced with your specific versions (there should be only one at first).

  • That's it. You can now build on 32bit Linux apps for Android.
    Your working folder can be deleted. There is no reference to it.

Further Information

I have tested this:

$ uname -a
Linux Generic 4.9.0-7-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 4.9.110-1 (2018-07-05) i686 GNU/Linux

$ qemu-x86_64 -version
qemu-x86_64 version 2.8.1(Debian 1:2.8+dfsg-6+deb9u4)
Copyright (c) 2003-2016 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers

Maybe it also works on other distro than Debian.
Currently I can't test more than pure Debian.