Installation of the development environment and first project on Android

On the internet we will find many tutorials dedicated to this topic, but most have a problem: they have become obsolete. Over time, Google has been making changes in the tools to develop Android. They have not always been to the liking of users because they were forced to change the way they work, or even found that the manuals and guides they used were no longer up to date.

Fortunately, the process of installing the Android development environment is easier than ever, and here we are going to see it in detail. We will start from the assumption of not having anything installed, and our goal is to develop our first application on Android, the famous Hello World.

SDK Download

In this link we will download the entire development environment in one step. The package includes almost everything we will need:

• Eclipse + ADT plugin
• The Android SDK tools
• Android platform tools
• The latest Android platform
• Latest emulators

If you are more familiar with Android, you can download only the SDK. The web will show you a single link depending on your operating system, but you can also download the other versions. They exist for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, 32- and 64-bit Linux, and Mac. If in doubt, go directly to the suggested download, Mac for this example:

Installation

For the 3 platforms we will have to take note of the directory where the SDK is installed, we will need it later.

Mac

We will download a zip that will be unzipped in a folder with a name like adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-xxxx. We'll move it to a directory we know about, typically ~ / Development.

Linux

It will work in a very similar way to Mac, we will follow the same steps.

Windows

We will download an .exe that will guide us through the entire process, downloading the Java JDK if necessary.

Finally we will start Eclipse, and we will go to Preferences → Android, and we will put the path to the SDK that corresponds to us.

With these simple steps, we are ready to do our first project and get it started.

First project

We will do File → New → Android Application Project, and we will put "Hello World" as the name of the application. We will set the theme to "none".

We accept everything, and when we get to the create activity screen, we will leave it empty, and continue until the wizard is finished.

We will click on the green arrow in the upper toolbar, and we will execute our project as an Android application:

As we still do not have any virtual emulator (AVD) created, we will have an error message to which we will answer yes. When we have the Android Virtual Device Manager open, we will create a new one like this:

We accept, we continue, and if everything has gone well, after a few moments of loading, we will have our first project going. Congratulations!

More information - Basic guide to programming in Android

Downloads - Android SDK