Setup the Development Environment

Introduction

Unlike iOS, which can only be developed on macOS, Android development can be done on either Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. Moreover, all the tools are freely available for download. This lesson will walk you through setting up your device for Android app development.

Installing Android Studio

Android Studio is the official IDE for Android app development and provides a host of features. Some of the noteworthy ones are:

• A Gradle-based build system that can be infinitely customized to get improved build times and can automate mandated tasks.
• A wide variety of emulators, allowing us to test the application on different OS versions and resolutions.
• GitHub integration to easily leverage version-control capabilities.
• A host of tools to extensively test the application.

To get started with Android Studio, download the latest version of the IDE for your operating system.

Follow the steps in the installation wizard to install the application.

Note:

• Mac users might need to allow the IDE access to their calendar, contacts, or photos when prompted.
• Ubuntu users on a 64-bit machine would need to install the following libraries on their device:

  sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386 lib32z1 libbz2-1.0:i386
  

• If you’re using a 64-bit Fedora device, you’ll need to install the following libraries:

  sudo yum install zlib.i686 ncurses-libs.i686 bzip2-libs.i686
  

For more detailed installation instructions, you can refer to the official documentation here.

Configuring the IDE

Android studio provides two different configuration files using the Help menu that can be used to configure things like plugin path, heap size, and cache size. Let’s go over some of the common configurations we might want to change.

Edit custom VM options

The studio.vmoptions file lets us configure the heap size and the cache size. Click “Help > Edit Custom VM options” to edit the configs. When we open this file for the first time, it will prompt us to create a new file. Otherwise, it will open the editor window.