Back in the early versions of Android, developers had to use Eclipse to develop their apps, but fortunately those dark ages are long gone.
Android Studio is the official IDE for Android development. It’s just like Jetbrains’ IntelliJ, but optimised for Android and fully supported by Google.
Rather than showing here how to download and install Android Studio, I’ll simply provide the URL for the download page. There you can find the download and install instructions for whatever operating system you use — I personally recommend either Linux or Mac. They perform a lot better than Windows when it comes to Android development.
Since Android’s source code is in Kotlin (or Java), you’ll need to install the Java Development Kit (JDK) as well. You can download it here.
This installation pack contains both Android Studio and the SDK (software development kit). The main focus of this post will be the SDK, since installing Android Studio should be no big deal at all to you.
Once you’ve installed Android Studio you should open the SDK Manager and download some necessary packages, which I’ll explain a bit about each, before you actually start coding.
The SDK Manager is a very simple and practical tool for downloading and installing the Android framework itself and other necessary packages for your projects. In earlier versions it was a standalone application (still accessible through Android Studio), but now it’s embedded to the IDE, making things even easier.
To install a package, just check the corresponding box.
An Android API is a release of the framework. For example, Android Marshmallow comprises API 23, Nougat 24 and 25 and Oreo 26 and 27 up to now.
You will notice that you can download any API you want, but you don’t need to download all of them since they are incremental, so downloading only the latest one will be enough.
These are tools used to debug, build and run and test your projects. They can be used via command line or with the IDE.
Again, there’s no need to download more than one version, but the build tools version should match the API you’re using. i.e.: if you’re using API 27, the build tools’ version should be 27.x.x.
Android SDK Platform-Tools is a component for the Android SDK. It includes tools that interface with the Android platform, such as adb, fastboot, and systrace. — Android official documentation
ADB, Android Debug Bridge is a command line tool that allows communication between the computer and an Android device, physical or not.
Fastboot allows communication with devices in bootloader mode.
Systrace allows you to collect and analyse system information such as processes, kernel, CPU usage, etc.
You must install this package if you want to use any Google Play APIs in your apps like Google Sign In, Drive, Maps, etc.
It’s necessary to install this package if you’re going to develop apps with backwards compatibility (API 20 and under), which is a very good idea.
If you don’t have an Android device or you just want to test your code in the computer you can install this package. It allows you to set up loads of different virtual devices in your machine.
This is not a must have, but a nice to have. It’s always handy to have a documentation for the framework. In fact, the Android framework documentation is by far one of the richest I’ve ever seen!
