Extra privilege: About system apps and how to build your own

System apps are an essential part of our Android devices. Not only do they get the special treatment of coming pre-installed out of the box on your phone, car or smart fridge, they also come with access to much more functionality on the Android OS than your average Play Store app. They get to use special APIs and don’t have to ask for runtime permissions.
But where do you even get started if you ever find yourself in the situation where you get to build a system app yourself? To find out, we will go through the process of building a small privileged system app together.

In this session we’ll go through the steps of:
- Importing a demo app into Android Studio for Platform (ASfP)
- Setting up the Android.bp build files for it
- Pre-approving runtime permissions
- Adding some System API functionality
- And finally, upgrading it to a privileged app

Along the way, we will check out some debugging tricks and helpful tools.