This is a old post that has been migrated. While the content is probably very obsolete, in case someone needs it, it's here. Also makes great filler for a empty blog.

Note: Android development works pretty fine without having a case sensitive filesystem as of today (March 2014), at least from the cases I have tried. This applies to both ADK and NDK.

To begin with, this is more of a warning article for people who want to do Android development on a Mac. If you don't fall into that criteria, it's probably not of much use for the average user. (Unless you like tinkering, and happened to accidentally change your filesystem type to HFS+ case sensitive)

If you want to do Android work smoothly on a Mac, due to certain dependencies you will need to change your filesystem to case sensitive or create a case sensitive disk image. I personally went for the former approach, as I invested a large sum of money to get a SSD, and was planning to get the most out of it.

Sadly, that was a bad censored move.

It turns out that most Adobe software, and Steam is very picky about being on a case sensitive filesystem too. I've reached their helpdesk about this, and got numerous near-machine responses that did not help at all - including "We do not support that", "Please try re-installing Steam", "Please delete your user directory and run Steam again" and much more. Nobody seemed to actually read through what problem I had, nor actually even bother to pass on the numerous stacktraces that I attached after applying the somewhat official workaround.

After a couple weeks of not being able to play a game I paid for, I decided to bite the bullet and go down the road of boot camp. Steam to this day still runs there, and neither a patch for the issue I have encountered nor official case-sensitive filesystem has been released as of today.

To top that off, Adobe decided to make two of the brightest decisions ever made in software history: 1) To disallow installation of a huge software package on anything that's not the boot drive,and 2) Disallowing case sensitivity due to sloppy packaging and not caring about the minority of the users. Due to decision (1), the installer doesn't even start since you are never given a option to install on a case in-sensitive secondary drive.

Not to mention all the bloatware that any Adobe software brings into the house - this is simply not fun when you are running on a fairly small amount of storage (i.e. SSD) and you happen to have a large secondary drive you can't use to dump all the bloatware into. I don't know what they were thinking, but unless they fix this issue I'll be gladly using something else for the time being.