Android device is one of the most used and popular devices world-wide. With over millions of people getting android devices, many may want to know the fundamental questions regarding the basics of android. So what actually is android? The Android mascot is a green robot: you might have seen it around.To answer that question, Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphone and tablets. In addition, Google has further developed Android TV for televisions, Android Auto for cars, and Wear OS for wrist watches, each with a specialized user interface. Variants of Android are also used on game, digital cameras, computers and other electronics. Let us now take a step forward towards how to develop a simple android mobile app by ourselves.
There are basically following steps we need to follow to get started with android application development which can be mentioned as below:
- Installing Android Studio
- Running Android Studio
- Start app development
Step 1: Installing Android Studio
For the Android mobile app development, Android Studio is the official Integrated Development Environment (IDE), based on IntelliJ IDEA . It is the platform which you can use for the development of the app.For many years, Eclipse IDE with the ADT plugin was the preferred platform for Android development. Today it’s Android Studio.
- Visit the link https://developer.android.com/studio/ for downloading the android studio. You can choose whether you want to download 32 bit or 64 bit version according to the bit version of your computer. You can see the options in “Download Options” Button where you can download android studio for Mac, Linux, Windows and other operating systems with different bit versions.
- Then you need to click on “I agree with the terms and condition button” and download the android studio.
- After the android studio is downloaded, run the software. After you have clicked on Run as administrator, firstly you need to choose the location to store the software as given in picture below.
Choose location and click on next - Note: The above android setup is for the computer which already has the previous version of android studio. When you tick mark on the “Uninstall previous version” checkbox, the previous version is deleted.
- Then click next to continue as suggested.Tick mark on Android Virtual Device in the next window. Tick mark on the Android SDK as well if given in option. Here the Android SDK is not given because I already have the previous version of Android and the SDKs are already installed.
Select Android Virtual Device and click Next - Then the next dialog box invites you to change the installation locations for Android Studio. Change the location or accept the default locations and click Next.
Set the Android Studio installation locations - The installer defaults to creating a shortcut for launching this program, or you can choose to decline. I recommend that you create the shortcut, then click the Install button to begin installation.
Create a new shortcut for android studio - The resulting dialog box will let you see the progress of installing android studio. When you click on the Show Details button it will let you view detailed information about the installation progress.The dialog box will inform you when installation has finished. When you click Next, you should see the following:
Leave the Start Android Studio check box checked to run this software and click on finish. So, the android Studio is now installed.
Step 2: Running Android Studio
Android Studio presents a splash screen as follows when it starts running:
If you don’t import any settings from the previous version or you have installed android studio for the first time then android Studio will respond with the splash screen followed by Android Studio Setup Wizard dialog box:
After you click on Next, the setup wizard will invite you to select the installation type i.e either standard or custom, for your SDK components. For now I would recommend you to keep the default standard setting.
Now, you have to click Next and verify your settings, then click Finish to continue.
Various components required by the android studio will be downloaded and unzipped by the wizard. Click Show Details if you want to see more information about the archives being downloaded and their contents as shown in the figure below.
However,if your computer isn’t Intel based, you might get an unpleasant surprise after the components have completely downloaded and unzipped as shown below:
Your options are to either put up with the slow emulator or use an Android device to speed up development. However, use of HAXM accelerator increases the speed of app development using emulator i.e it configures Virtual Machine Configuration, which I will discuss in other posts.
Finally, click Finish to complete the wizard. You should see the Welcome to Android Studio dialog box like given below:
You’ll use this dialog to start up a new Android Studio project, work with an existing project, open the project from GitHub and many more You can access it anytime by double-clicking the Android Studio shortcut on your desktop which you had created earlier. Thus, this is the way of installing the android studio and setting it up. I will write about the creation of simple android apps using android studio in my upcoming posts. There are many other Android SDK (Software Development Kit) which you need to install for the creation of different apps. I will come up with solutions to different problems which are simple yet confusing regarding android studio and mobile app development real soon. I will explain the third step of this post in the coming days.
