How to develop for Android with Xamarin?
Short answer
Yes, you can develop with Xamarin.Android on Ubuntu! However, since Linux, sadly, isn't oficially supported by Xamarin, it's not as straightforward as it would be on Windows. In short, first of all you have to install Java, Mono and Android Studio, then you have to compile Xamarin.Android yourself and finally you have to setup your favorite IDE to work with Xamarin.
.
Prerequisites
Installing Android Studio
(Note: In theory you could just download the Android SDK and NDK, I haven't tried it though.)
Installation of Android Studio on Ubuntu has been covered thoroughly in a different SO answer, but I'll go over it quickly: first you need to install Java 8 JDK. While it's officially recommended to use Oracle Java, OpenJDK will do just fine:
sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk
You'll also need to set the JAVA_HOME
variable to match the installation directory of your Java 8 JDK. To do so, add this line to your ~/.bashrc
:
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64
Then you have to download Android Studio and unzip it somewhere you like, for example your home folder, or /opt/androidstudio
.
Once you have it, you can start it up and open SDK Manager in the top right corner:
Now download the SDK versions you want to target. Be sure to also install NDK, though, as that's what we will need to deploy Xamarin applications. Then you can try building an sample app and deploying it to your phone (or to a running emulator) just to make sure everything works all right.
You also need to set the AndroidSdkDirectory
environment variable, so that Xamarin knows where to look for the installed SDKs. You can do this by adding this line to your .bashrc
, .zshrc
or whatever shell you use:
export AndroidSdkDirectory=~/Android/Sdk
You can also create aliases for useful commands:
alias sdkmanager=~/Android/Sdk/tools/bin/sdkmanager
alias avdmanager=~/Android/Sdk/tools/bin/avdmanager
alias adb=~/Android/Sdk/platform-tools/adb
alias android-emulator=~/Android/Sdk/emulator/emulator
Installing Mono
As of October 2019, Ubuntu still doesn't have Mono 5 in its repositories. Therefore we'll have to add the official Mono repositories (it's a good idea anyway):
sudo apt install gnupg ca-certificates
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb https://download.mono-project.com/repo/ubuntu stable-bionic main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official-stable.list
sudo apt update
Next step we install the Mono development packages. Maybe you won't need everything, but I was lazy and went with mono-complete
. You'll also need nuget
, so let's install that too:
sudo apt install mono-complete nuget
You can check whether the correct version was installed by trying the msbuild
command. The old versions of Mono didn't have it, so if the command was found, you're probably ready to go.
.
Compiling Xamarin.Android
Dependencies
There are some dependencies needed to successfully compile Xamarin.Android. Most of those packages will be already installed on your machine, so you can try skipping this step and only installing those that are missing. However, it takes some significant time to retry the build, so you'll save it by installing them right away:
sudo apt install autoconf autotools-dev automake cmake build-essential curl gcc g++ g++-mingw-w64 gcc-mingw-w64 git libncurses5-dev libtool libz-mingw-w64-dev libzip-dev linux-libc-dev make ninja-build p7zip-full sqlite3 vim-common zlib1g-dev linux-libc-dev:i386 zlib1g-dev:i386 libx32tinfo-dev
Cloning
Fetch the latest Xamarin.Android source code from GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android.git
cd xamarin-android
You probably don't want to build from master, so choose a stable release in the GitHub repo and check it out with git checkout [chosen commit hash]
. Make sure to also reset the submodules to the correct version.
System detection
If you're using a distribution derived from Ubuntu, you'll have to add an extra line to the system detection code to make it work:
nano build-tools/xaprepare/xaprepare/OperatingSystems/Linux.cs
and under the line
{"Ubuntu", (ctx) => new LinuxUbuntu (ctx)},
you have to add a line for your system, eg. for Elementary OS it's:
{"elementary",(ctx) => new LinuxUbuntu (ctx)},
If you're on pure Ubuntu, you can skip this step.
Build
First you have to build all the dependencies:
make prepare
And then you can build Xamarin.Android itself. If you only want to target the latest Android, run:
make
(The targeted version is the latest Android version supported by your application. So if you want to write apps for Android versions from 7 to 10, you want to target v10.0
. If you want to be able to target any version of Android, you'll have to run make jenkins
instead.)
Both of those steps require a significant amount of patience and Internet connection.
Installation
Finally you can install Xamarin.Android to your system:
sudo make install prefix=/usr
.
Using Xamarin
Set up a project
To test that our build actually works, we want to build and deploy an actual Xamarin project. Ideal for this purpose are the demo projects in xamarin/monodroid repository. So let's clone it:
git clone https://github.com/xamarin/monodroid-samples.git
cd monodroid-samples/Button
Add supported ABIs
For some reason, we need to add the list of supported ABIs to the project file. Open it in an editor:
nano DroidButton.csproj
And to the first PropertyGroup
add this line:
<AndroidSupportedAbis>armeabi-v7a;arm64-v8a;x86</AndroidSupportedAbis>
If you didn't build with make jenkins
, you'll also want to change the TargetFrameworkVersion
to v10.0
.
Build
msbuild
Deploy
Either start up a virtual device in AVD Manager (accessible eg. through Android Studio), or connect a phone in debug mode and then run:
msbuild /t:Install
This should install the app to your phone. If you want to build and deploy with one command, you can use /t:Build,Install
. If you want to pass extra parameters to ADB (for example to identify the device where to deploy), use /p:AdbTarget=[adb options]
, for example: msbuild /t:Install /p:AdbTarget=-s1080c487
.
.
Summary
So we've got Xamarin set up! This was a long journey, wasn't it? Full of surprises, letdowns and often pure misery. Was it worth it? You are to decide, but for me it definitely was. Now, take a break (only a short one though!) and then start building your dream application!
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m93a
Licensing note: All original code snippets I post on StackOverflow and other Stack Exchange sites are licensed under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication – do with them as you see fit.
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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m93a over 1 year
I want to develop applications for Android in C#. On Windows I tried Xamarin Studio and I was very happy with it. Is there a way to use Xamarin on Ubuntu?
I noticed there are Xamarin.Android binaries for Linux available on the internet, but those are only for Xamarin.Android 9.22, I would love to use Xamarin.Android 10. Can this be done?
Lastly, I know there is no Xamarin Studio for Linux. What IDE can I use instead of it? How do I set it up for building Android apps and deploying them?
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m93a over 4 yearsI've built Xamarin 10.0.0.43 with
make jenkins
and uploaded it here. Hopefully it can save you some time. -
Eman over 4 yearsI keep getting this error when I run make
unable to find package java.lang in classpath or bootclasspath
not sure what I'm doing wrong -
m93a over 4 yearsHmm... never got that. Are you sure that your Java JDK is properly installed, correct version and included in PATH?
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Eman over 4 yearsI have openJDK 8 and oddly enough I got it to work once and now it doesn't, the make logs show that it detected my version of java. it's very odd, Wondering if the path got lost
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Eman over 4 yearsdid you override any configuration values by chance?
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m93a over 4 yearsAaah, I see it now. I've got this line in my
.zshrc
:export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0-openjdk-amd64
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Eman over 4 yearsI'll give that a try tonight
-
Eman over 4 yearsgrasping at straws but think the fact I can't clone monodroid is why my build fails. I don't know why else it's not working, especially when it used to work at one point.
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m93a over 4 yearsAre you on branch master and have you reset all submodules to the correct version (does your
git status
saynothing to commit
)? -
Eman over 4 yearsI was on master but then switched to the latest release tag
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Eman over 4 yearsI got it working, according to the xamarin guys I should rely on the jdk & android sdk provided by them during the prepare process, that was the trick for me
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Chirag Mittal over 4 yearsOn executing command
make prepare
, it says "Some programs are missing or have invalid versions, but automatic provisioning is disabled". Packagelibncurses-dev
was missing. I triedsudo apt-get install libncurses-dev
, but it automatically selectslibncurses5-dev
which is already installed. -
m93a over 4 yearsDoes
make
say which version it needs? (It should afaik.) Try getting that version. I didn't have this problem so I'm not sure I can help you with it… -
Chirag Mittal over 4 years@m93a It needs
libncurses-dev
. Doesn't say anything about version. -
Chirag Mittal over 4 yearsOkay so I found the file
xamarin-android/build-tools/xaprepare/xaprepare/ConfigAndData/Dependencies/Linux.DebianCommon.cs
which has names of all the packages thatmake
searches for. There, I changedlibncurses-dev
tolibncurses5-dev
. Everything works now. Ubuntu scares me sometimes!