Android 10 GSI image contains just the Android 10 system image and the vbmeta image. Recently Google made the Android 10 stable release for Google Pixel devices, followed by Essential Ph-1, and simultaneously Android 10 for Redmi K20 Pro by xiaomi and OxygenOS based Android 10 for OnePlus 7 and 7 Pro has also been released.
What is Android 10 GSI:
Starting from project Treble in Android, Google has removed the Android system’s dependency from any vendor implementation which is usually hardware dependant. A GSI which stands for Generic System Image includes the whole AOSP Android code stack which runs above the hardware layer.
Android GSI can run on any Android phone just by replacing its existing system image.
Android 10 GSI is the Generic System Image for Android 10 AOSP code which when flashed on an Android phone can directly run Android 10 literally out-of-box but practically few fixes are needed to make it run successfully.
Download Android 10 GSI:
Android 10 AOSP source code has been already pushed to the public repo and the Android 10 GSI images are made available at the same time.
Below are the Android 10 GSI details:
Date: September 2019
Security patch level: September 5, 2019
Google Play Services: 18.7.19
Following are the direct download links to download Android 10 GSI:
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[button anchor=”Android 10 GSI for ARM64 with Google Play Services” url=”https://dl.google.com/developers/android/qt/images/gsi/gsi_gms_arm64-QP1A.190771.020-5800535.zip” size=”lg” style=”metro” color=”blue-sky” block=”yes”]
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[su_note note_color=”#D7E3F4″ text_color=”#728095″ radius=”3″ class=”” id=””]The ARM64 GSI + GMS usually contains the Google Play Services. but if you are downloading the GSI without GMS then you may have to install Android 10 GApps to get Google Play Services and all other Google proprietary apps.[/su_note]
How to use Android 10 GSI:
Since Android Oreo when the project treble was released on Android it is the Vendor partition which contains all proprietary blobs usually called as the HAL layer and not the /system partition. Usually the /vendor partition contains shared libraries for OEM specific and SoC specific code.
Then the Linux the kernel which has all the driver code for the hardware lives in the /boot partition.
So most of the hardware dependent code or data is now out of the /system partition which now contains only pure AOSP code.
Ideally a GSI is meant for a developer to use on different device configurations to see the compatibility issues and fix, if any. But the same GSI is used by kernel developers to run latest Android, in this case Android 10 on an Android phone running Android Pie or Android Oreo, which are Android project Treble capable.
Mostly it is simple to flash the system.img to system partition using fastboot and vbmeta.img to vbmeta partition, that’s all. But still there are many challenges that comes on devices running on GSI, which requires some workaround to be in place to run the hardware without any issues.
Most of the how-to update guides will be found in respective device specific forum.
So, this is all about Android 10 GSI download and few insight about them. Login to comment if you have any queries on this article and stay tuned for more updates on Android 10.