The Question

Why are you obsessed about debs!? Are you lazy!?

Actually, we're lazy too. But debs don't make sense for ros android stacks for several reasons and there are actually even lazier ways of doing things than debs for android sources.

Technical Problems

Even if we wished to build debs, there are a couple of showstoppers:

• No-one builds binaries for the android sdk, so we'd have to do that ourselves and label it as a rosdep.
  • If google can't be bothered (but can for chrome), you have to re-ask yourself whether it's a good idea to do ourselves.
  • It's a horrible moving target to chase.
• Gradle plugins for android aren't quite up to scratch to do what we want on the build farm yet - particularly maven-publish.

The Real Deal

The real answer to the question though is in what benefit we'd get from it. Which, is basically none.

• Don't need or use rosdeps in any significant way
• No benefit as mixed ros packages because there is no runtime environment for ros-android on your pc.

• Don't need debian dependency management because we have maven.

And with maven, you get an even lazier solution for your android sources. You can import the sources directly into android studio and maven will serenely and automagically take care of all your dependencies for you.