Boringdroid is an AOSP-extending project that layers a minimal multi-window patchset on top of stock Android. It tracks AOSP 9.0 through 14.0; this branch is boringdroid-14.0.0. The patches are intentionally small, conservative, and almost-upstream-quality. A lot of the rough edges the patchset originally papered over have been smoothed out by AOSP itself in later releases, which is the point.

Home screen on the boringdroid_x86_64-userdebug emulator: the purple default wallpaper, Launcher's hotseat sitting above the taskbar, and the boringdroid taskbar pinned at the bottom with a start pill, search pill, centered running-app rail, and the system tray.

Compose-built start menu with a search pill, a pinned-app grid, and a user rail (lock, sign-out, power). Opens from the start button, the search pill, or the Meta key.

Clock header, a 3×3 grid of named quick-settings tiles (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DND, Rotate, Airplane, Battery saver, Night light, Hotspot), a now-playing media card, the notification list, and a Clear all action. Opens on the taskbar bell.

42-day month grid with next/previous navigation, event dots pulled from CalendarContract.Instances, and today's agenda below. Opens on the taskbar clock; opening it closes the Action Center.

Mission-Control-style expo. Each card is sized to its real window bounds under a common scale, so portrait popups read as portrait and landscape freeform windows read as landscape. Tapping a thumbnail or its caption brings the task back to the front. Triggered from the taskbar or Alt+Tab.

config_freeformWindowManagement=true ships by default. Apps open in resizable freeform windows with minimize / maximize / close in the title bar, and the framework persists each app's bounds and windowing mode across sessions.

When a freeform window is maximized to fullscreen, the title bar is gone but the minimize / restore / close controls are still one cursor move away: park the pointer at the top edge of the screen and a slim caption slides down. Move away and it tucks back. Closes issue #1. Gated by persist.boringdroid.peek_caption (default on), and only arms when WMShell is running the legacy caption — modern desktop-mode caption (persist.wm.debug.desktop_mode / _2) keeps its own in-window caption visible after maximize, so peek skips arming to avoid duplication.

Right-click any running-app icon in the taskbar and you get a small popup with Maximize/Restore, Minimize, and Close — the same three actions a window caption offers, anchored at the icon rather than the window. Useful for windows pushed off-screen, hidden behind others, or simply when your cursor is closer to the taskbar than the title bar.

mkdir -p boringdroid/14
cd boringdroid/14
repo init -u https://github.com/boringdroid/manifest.git -b boringdroid-14.0.0
repo sync -c -d --no-tags

source build/envsetup.sh
lunch boringdroid_x86_64-userdebug
m

The default product is boringdroid_x86_64, derived from sdk_phone_x86_64, so the resulting image runs in the AOSP emulator. After m finishes, launch it with emulator.

From boringdroid-13.0.0 onward, if the build fails with a "boot image verified" error, retry with a smaller -j value (e.g. m -j8). The underlying race is upstream; the lower parallelism is a workaround.

The samples/HelloBoringdroid module is an all-in-one Compose demo that exercises every distinctive boringdroid surface in a single APK: freeform window with a draggable caption, peek caption when maximized, taskbar context menu on long-press, a <monochrome> adaptive-icon layer for Material You themed icons, and a Material 3 body that pulls dynamicLight/DarkColorScheme(context) from the wallpaper on Android 12+. It doubles as a smoke-test target — launch it, drive each surface manually, watch logcat.

Build and install with:

source build/envsetup.sh
lunch boringdroid_x86_64-userdebug
m HelloBoringdroid
adb install -r out/target/product/boringdroid_x86_64/system/app/HelloBoringdroid/HelloBoringdroid.apk

The sample is a Soong module (sdk_version: "current") — no Gradle, no platform_apis, so it stays consumable by anyone forking boringdroid. Source code, layout details, and a per-surface verification recipe live in samples/HelloBoringdroid/README.md.

See CONTRIBUTING.

See ARCHITECTURE.

The Android-x86 project has accepted ported patches from boringdroid into its repositories.

Boringdroid is a BlissLabs project.

Thanks to Roger Truttmann of BlissLabs for the logo.

Modifications to AOSP files inherit the upstream Apache 2.0 license. Boringdroid-owned projects ship under their own LICENSE file.