Pocket Studio by NativeWorks
Licensing

Open source

Pocket Studio only exists because of a very large amount of other people's work. Here's what it's built on and what your rights are.

The complete notices are in the app

The authoritative, per-component list of every bundled library with its licence text lives in the app itself, under Settings → About → Open-source licenses. It is generated from what the build actually ships, so it can't drift from reality the way a hand-maintained web page would.

What's in there, broadly

The IDE is assembled from a lot of moving parts, and they carry a mix of licences:

  • The build toolchain — Gradle, the Android Gradle Plugin and the Kotlin compiler (Apache-2.0), and an OpenJDK runtime built independently by this project (GPL-2.0 with the Classpath Exception). This is not Oracle Java SE and we make no Java SE compatibility claim.
  • The editor — sora-editor (LGPL-2.1), used unmodified, plus tree-sitter grammars for 21 languages.
  • Language servers for Java, Kotlin, C/C++, Python and Rust, each under its own upstream licence, installed on first use rather than bundled.
  • The terminal userland — bash, git, readline, coreutils-style tools and their dependencies, largely from the Termux packaging project (GPL/LGPL and various permissive licences).
  • Git support — libgit2 (GPL-2.0 with a linking exception) and the git CLI (GPL-2.0).
  • Compression — zlib-ng, and a range of permissive-licensed native libraries supporting the above.

Corresponding source

Several bundled components are covered by the GPL or LGPL. For those, you are entitled to the complete corresponding source of the version we ship — including the patches and build recipes we use, not just a link to an upstream tarball.

How to get it right now: email nativeworksapp@gmail.com with the app version you're asking about (Settings → About) and it will be sent to you. A public repository containing the same material, indexed by app version, is being published; this page will link to it directly once it is live.

The corresponding-source material is organised per release: for each copyleft component it carries either the source itself or a pinned upstream tag plus our patches and the script that builds it, so that a given app version can be reproduced.

Relinking LGPL components

For LGPL components linked into the app — the editor being the main one — the release build deliberately preserves those class names rather than obfuscating them, so that the library can be replaced with a modified version. That's a requirement of the licence and it is checked as part of the release process.

Trademarks

Android is a trademark of Google LLC. Kotlin is a trademark of the Kotlin Foundation. Java is a trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates — we describe the Java language descriptively and never brand the bundled runtime as "Java" or claim Java SE compatibility. Pocket Studio is an independent project, not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them.