BuilDroid: A Self-Correcting LLM Agent for Automated Android Builds

The continuous evolution of the Android ecosystem has led to a highly dynamic and fragmented development environment. This constant churn makes building Android projects, especially from open-source repositories, a notoriously difficult task. Developers and researchers encounter a daunting build barrier due to the rapid configuration drift, which results in a cascade of errors. These errors include version incompatibilities, missing dependencies, and inconsistent project configurations, hindering reproducibility and maintainability.To address these issues, we present BuilDroid, an LLM-based agent that automates the build process of Android projects. Operating within a self-contained, isolated environment, BuilDroid runs an iterative, self-correcting loop. Through this operation, BuilDroid captures errors and autonomously resolves them, either through predefined heuristics or by leveraging the reasoning capabilities of its underlying LLM.Across 245 open-source Android projects, BuilDroid effectively resolves complex and evolving build errors, achieving a build success rate of 90.2%, surpassing existing solutions by a margin of over 30.2 percentage points. Consequently, BuilDroid reduces the barrier for researchers and developers, fostering greater software reproducibility and enabling more extensive and reliable empirical research within this rapidly evolving ecosystem.Video demo: https://youtu.be/YAFLu7NSl5E