I’ve hated Ant since the first time I laid eyes on it. So I’m glad I finally took the time to understand the Android build process in detail, and sat down to reproduce it in Python.

A while ago, I wrote about how to build multiple versions of an Android app (like a free and a donate version). That was a long post. Compare it to this:

project = AndroidProject('AndroidManifest.xml', sdk_dir='/opt/android')
for version in ('com.foo.app.free, 'com.foo.app.donate'):
    apk = project.build("%s.apk" % version, package_name=version)
    apk.sign('keystore', 'alias', 'name')
    apk.align()

Using the library, you can write your build scripts in plain Python, or with a Python-based build tool (personally, I’m using fabric). See for example the buildfile for Android-Autostarts.

The Github page has more usage samples.