Content License

For the purposes of licensing, the content of this site is divided into two categories:

  • Documentation content, found under the "Dev Guide" and "Reference" tabs, including both static content and content extracted from source code modules, as well as sample code, and
  • All other site content

The documentation content on this site is made available to you as part of the Android Open Source Project. This documentation, including any code shown in it, is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, the preferred license for all parts of the of the Android Open Source Project.

Apache 2.0 is a commercial and open-source-friendly software license. The majority of the Android platform and documentation is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. While the project strives to adhere to the preferred license, there may be exceptions, such as for documentation (code comments) extracted from a source code module that is licensed under GPLv2 or other license. In those cases, the license covering the source code module will apply to the documentation extracted from it.

All other content on this site, except the license documents themselves and as otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

You may use the content of this site in any way that is consistent with the specific license that applies to the content, as described above. For content licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5, we ask that you give proper attribution.

Terms of Use

We are pleased to license the Android documentation and sample code under terms that encourage you to take, modify, reuse, re-purpose, and remix the content as you see fit. Except as noted in the Restrictions section below, you are free to use the documentation content in your own creations. For example, you could quote the text in a book, cut-and-paste sections to your blog, record it as an audiobook for the visually impaired, or even translate it.

Restrictions

  • While the documentation itself is available to you under the Apache 2.0 license, note that proprietary trademarks and brand features are not included in that license.
  • Google's trademarks and other brand features (including the ANDROID stylized typeface logo) are not included in the license. Please see Guidelines for Third Party Use of Google Brand Features for information about this usage.
  • In some cases, a page may include content, such as an image, that is not covered by the license. In that case, we will label the content that is not licensed.
  • In addition, content linked from a page on this site is not covered by the license unless specifically noted. For example, pages may link to videos or slide decks that are not covered.
  • The use of sample source code provided in the SDK or shown in this documentation is subject to the conditions detailed in the SDK Terms and Conditions.

Attribution

Proper attribution is required when you reuse or create modified versions of content that appears on a page made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license. On this site, the requirement for attribution applies only to the non-documentation content, as described earlier in this document. The complete requirements for attribution can be found in section 4b of the Creative Commons legal code.

In practice we ask that you provide attribution to the Android Open Source project to the best of the ability of the medium in which you are producing the work. There are several typical ways in which this might apply:

Exact Reproductions

If your online work exactly reproduces text or images from this site, in whole or in part, please include a paragraph at the bottom of your page that reads:

Portions of this page are reproduced from work created and shared by the Android Open Source Project and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License.

Also, please link back to the original source page so that readers can refer there for more information.

Modified Versions

If your online work shows modified text or images based on the content from this site, please include a paragraph at the bottom of your page that reads:

Portions of this page are modifications based on work created and shared by the Android Open Source Project and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License.

Again, please link back to the original source page so that readers can refer there for more information. This is even more important when the content has been modified.

Other Media

If you produce non-hypertext works, such as books, audio, or video, we ask that you make a best effort to include a spoken or written attribution in the spirit of the messages above.