Building an Android APK on a Linux Box, No Root Required

AI;DR – This blog post was mostly generated by Claude (via Claude Code) as was the app which is described here. If you don’t want to read “AI slop”, stop reading now. First some background: I did not start with the idea that I wanted to create an Android App. The real reason I did this was because there already was an App on Google Play that claimed to do what I wanted to do and did actually work fine. But when I started it the second time it prompted me to allow cookies from tens of web urls and did not let me select “none” or “required only”. That was a big no no, so I uninstalled it. Later that day I was doing something completely different with Claude Code and it occurred to me whether it was possible to create such a simple Android app myself, without knowing anything about Android programming, without installing Android Studio or anything else that would permanently stay on the computer. And when that turned out to be possible, I wondered whether it would be possible to automate…