Appendix. Tutorial for developing on Android
In this appendix
- Installing the Android development environment
- Understanding the basics of Android development
Android is one of the traditional native platforms for mobile. It’s at its core Java and XML, deployed and distributed in .apk files. The IDE used to be Eclipse-based, but nowadays it’s Android Studio, based on IntelliJ IDEA.
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The Android compilation is carried out by a tool called Gradle (https://gradle.org/), which has its own configuration files.
Our sample projects are configured, though, so you usually don’t need to worry about this. The Android SDK is the shared component that does the hard work.
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Android is available for both Windows and Mac. We’ll go through the basic installation here to get you started—we’ll use screenshots from Mac, but the steps are the same for Windows as well.
If you already have Android Studio installed and running, you might still want to read the later parts of this appendix for an overview of Android development.
Although command-line tools for Android do exist, Android Studio is by far the most popular choice for an IDE. It’s free and available both for Windows and Mac. Go to https://developer.android.com/studio/to download the installer.
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