What Are Android Partitions? #androiddevelopment

Added: 2026-06-05

[00:00:00]What is considered a partition in the Android operating system? By the way, there is a motorcycle parade in Serbia today. I have never seen so many Harley-Davidsons before. Speaking of which, I love motorcycles. Let's get to the point. So, a partition is a separate logical section of disk storage where Android simply places a specific part of the system. Just like a computer has local disk C and local disk D, the Android operating system also has a number of directories, namely system, the main Android system part, vendor, the device manufacturers' code and files, product product or brand specific collaborations. System ext is an extension of the system, as you can tell from the name, system extension, data, where user data and the applications installed on your phone, on your smartphone, are stored, and the VB meta partition, data for Android verified boot. I talked about this in previous videos, but an important point, a partition is not just any folder inside the Android ecosystem, but partitions are specifically the folders I listed.

[00:01:04]In other words, system is not just a regular folder. Most often, there is a separate image behind it. For example, behind the system partition, there is an image called system.img.

[00:01:16]Behind the vendor partition, there is an image called vendor.img.

[00:01:21]So, why is this important for SE Linux?

[00:01:24]SE Linux can control which processes have access to files on different partitions. For example, processes with the system app domain have access to the system partition. Processes with the vendor service domain have access to the vendor partition. Processes with the untrusted app domain have access to the data app partition. And if a process tries to read from or write to files it does not have access to, SE Linux can block that access. In other words, a partition in Android is a separate section of the system that stores a specific type of data or components and is mounted into the file system as system, vendor, data, and so on. And if you want to learn more about IT, subscribe to the channel and like this video. That's all for now. Bye, everyone.