Android 5.0 Lollipop Source Fully Available to Build

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After many long hours of waiting, Google has finally finished pushing the full Android Lollipop source code to their Git mirror. Surprisingly, there are two revisions available already: 5.0.0_r1 for Nexus 9 and 5.0.0_r2 for Nexus Player. Get your terminals ready; there’s a lot of of repo syncing to do.

Google started to push the sources yesterday, but the whole process took them a little longer than most would have hoped. Android 5.0 is a big release, so there are lots of new repositories that needed to be added. If you can’t wait for Google to release the refreshed factory images and binaries, you can build the OS by yourself–albeit with older driver binaries. All you need to do is execute the following command in the Terminal window of your PC or build machine:

repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b android-5.0.0_r1

The sync process might take a long time, since you will have to download many gigabytes of data. And of course, the estimated time of arrival may vary due to factors like your connection speed and congestion. Soon, we will see numerous custom ROM based on Android 5.0 Lollipop, such as all the large-scale multi-device custom ROMs that we’ve all grown to love.

The exact release date for the Nexus device factory images is still unknown. But hopefully, we will see them start to appear in the next few days or weeks. Meanwhile, go to syncing and code reviewing!