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Toybox is a free and open-source software implementation of over 200 Unix command line utilities such as ls, cp, and mv. The Toybox project was started in 2006, and became a 0BSD licensed BusyBox alternative. Toybox is used for most of Android's command line tools in all currently supported Android versions, and is also used to build Android on Linux and macOS. All of the tools are tested on Linux, and many of them also work on BSD and macOS. Toybox aims to provide a BSD licensed replacement for the GPL licensed BusyBox. Toybox's major technical design goals are simplicity, smallness, speed and standard compliance. Toybox aims to be mostly POSIX-2008 and LSB 4.1 compatible, and doesn't focus on having every option found in GNU counterparts. Toybox is licensed using the permissive 0BSD license, where BusyBox uses the copyleft GNU General Public License, which led to different usage domains. BusyBox is mostly used in the copyleft FOSS domain, while Toybox is used mostly with permissive licensed projects and by commercial companies, e.g. Google's Android, which is an explicit target of Toybox. Feature-wise, Toybox has not reached parity with BusyBox. Toybox was started in early 2006 by Rob Landley after he ended his BusyBox maintainership due to a dispute with Bruce Perens, the original creator of BusyBox. In 2008, the project went dormant until the end of 2011. Rob Landley resumed work on Toybox, starting with relicensing from the GPL-2.0-only license to the BSD-2-Clause license with the goal of superseding the Android command line implementation. At the beginning of 2012, Sony employee Tim Bird suggested creating a permissively licensed alternative to BusyBox. In March 2013, the project was relicensed to an even more permissive 0BSD license. At the end of 2014, Toybox was integrated into the Android 6.0.x "Marshmallow" development branches for use on devices. In 2018, a host Toybox prebuilt was added to AOSP to help make the Android build itself more hermetic.

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