Android installation on Raspberry Pi 3 device

by Ritesh

Posted on September 4, 2017 at 7:00 PM

RTAndroid Installation on a Raspberry Pi 3 Device.

It is possible to install lots of operating system on a Raspberry Pi Computer apart from the ones bundled with the NOOBS package. Today i tried installing Android on my Raspberry Device.

1. Using a Linux machine (I used my Lenovo Laptop installed with Ubuntu), Download RTAndroid from Aachen Website. Click on Downloads > Device Updates > Raspberry Pi

2. Unzip the downloaded file onto your host (Linux) machine.

Unzip RTAndroid

3. Plug in the MicroSD card on the host linux machine (my Lenovo Laptop). Open a terminal and type

fdisk-l
fdisk-l i.e. fdisk-list will enlist the attached disk drives. The intention is to find the name of the plugged in MicroSD (mine was /dev/mmcblk0).

List fdisk

4. In the terminal , type the follwing :

./install.sh -p -f /dev/mmcblk0
to flash the Android onto the Micro SDCard attached to the host Linux machine.
install Android in Raspberry Pi



It should take few minutes to complete the flashing process on your Pi.
flashing RTAndroid onto SDCard

5. Now unmount your MicroSD from host computer and plug into the Raspberry Pi. After booting, the display should appear something like this as shown below. I have attached a 7 inch LCD Display to by Raspi device ordered from Aliexpress.
LCD Display

Install opengapps

6. Now what gets installed is a barebone Android. It doesnot even have Google Play installed to allow any further apk installations. We need gapps to be installed now. In the Host Computer where the Android package was unzipped, there is a shell script (gapps.sh) to perform the task. The shell script installs the opengapps package onto the Android device over Network. gapps.sh shell script to install opengapps
You would also need to install adb (Android Debug Bridge) and lzip package to make it work further.

7. Open the gapps.sh file and edit parameters in the file. The default file may not work. Before installation you would require certain details to match your environment.
a) IP Address of the Android device. (On android device find it under Settings>About Device). The Ip address needs to be entered in the ADB_ADDRESS parameter
b) opengapps package details. Open the url https://github.com/opengapps/arm/releases and find/select/note the suitable package. You can use the smallest pico version for now.

select opengapps package

c) TIMESTAMP : is the date in the filename of opengapps package
d) VERSION : version in the filename of opengapps package
e) PACKAGE_NAME : filename of opengapps package

8. Adjust the wget parameters in the gapps.sh

select opengapps package
Since my internet connection was slow I downloaded the opengapps package into my local drive and used cp instead of wget (the parameter -0 was removed in this case if wget is not used)

9. Atlast run the sh script

./gapps.sh -a arm

Run gapps.sh


Run gapps.sh


gapps installed!