Applications

Declare applications

One of the main features of Nix Android is declaring applications. Currently, the following methods are supported:

The F-Droid and IzzyOnDroid repositories are natively supported. This means that the different app versions are attached to different Flake versions. These are automatically updated and released daily by the Android Nix CI. This means that you still get reproducibility without worrying about downloading APKs or calculating hashes.

Each of the officially supported repositories has its own namespace within android.apps:

F-Droid: android.apps.fdroid.
IzzyOnDroid: android.apps.izzyondroid.

Package names are normalized by replacing the dot with an underscore. Thus, org.videolan.vlc is turned into org_videolan_vlc.

{ android, ... }:

{
  apps = with android.apps; [
    fdroid.org_videolan_vlc
    izzyondroid.com_geeksville_mesh
  ];
}

In order to update these apps, you need to run nix flake update.

Remote APKs

You can retrieve remote APKs with the lib.remoteApk function. If the hash does not match, the evaluation will fail. Thus, it is recommended to use immutable URLs.

Tip

You can pre-compute the hash by running nix store prefetch-file <URL>

{ android, ... }:

{
  apps = with android.apps; [
    (lib.remoteApk {
      name = "org.lichess.mobileV2";
      hash = "sha256-ai3sDnXyNK0QUOMix+/VaJBNDywJFT/dqQBlmPv6Qik=";
      url = "https://f-droid.org/repo/org.lichess.mobileV2_300103.apk";
    })
  ];
}

Local APKs

You can use local APKs with the lib.localApk function.

{ android, ... }:

{
  apps = with android.apps; [
    (lib.localApk {
      name = "org.lichess.mobileV2";
      src = ./applications/org.lichess.mobileV2_300103.apk;
    })
  ];
}

Default applications

You can declare the default application for certain roles (e.g., browser) with the defaultApps attribute. The name must be the role identifier and the key a reference to an application (see above).

Note

You do not need to re-declare the applications in apps. Android Nix de-duplicates both sets and derives the application bundle from them.

Tip

You can find all available roles in AOSP here: https://source.android.com/docs/core/permissions/android-roles

{ android, ... }:

{
  defaultApps = with android.apps; {
    "android.app.role.BROWSER" = fdroid.org_mozilla_fennec_fdroid;
  };
}

Disable applications

{ android, ... }:

{
  disabledApps = [
    "com.android.egg"
  ];
}

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