Contents
Android Developer Reference
This is the official Google Android site for developers. Here you will find all the documentation you need to develop rich android applications.
You will most likely visit this site often.
All tutorials and sample code are credited to their respected owners.
Portions of this page are reproduced from work created and shared by the Android Open Source Project and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License.
Set Up your Environment
Setting up your environment requires quite a bit of forward thinking. At a minimum, you can create an android app just with Notepad, Java Development Kit, and the Android Development Kit. But, I know from experience that this might not be the way to go for most people.
There are software alternative for creating apps easier and intuitively. There are links to some development tools below this text to check out or go and visit the Downloads page for more information.
Below lists the most common steps to setting up your environment (however there are other ways) this seems to have excellent results.
Download Software
The first thing, is to download the required software tools, these are:
- Go to http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html#ExistingIDE and download the Android SDK, the Android ADT, and the Java SDK software.
- Install the file you just downloaded.
- Decide which development software you wish to use. (Some suggestion are listed below).
- Download and/or read as much literature you can about android development. The more you know the better off you will be in the long run.
You can go to
http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/bundle.html to learn how to install and configure the ADT toolkit.
A little information on IDE's
- Do try as many different IDE's as you can, there are many that do things that others don't and might take a few tries to find the one that works for you.
- Create a test project on each one, compare the code creation tools, some even are template based allowing you to create a project right out of the box. (Templates are not always as good as they seem).
- Some are free and some are relatively inexpensive.
- Most of the free ones tried worked really well and might be all you need, but if you need more you might have pay for it.
There are an awful lot of choices, but if you do your research well in the beginning you will have less headaches later on.
Setting Up your IDE's
There are 3 very popular IDE's out there that you can find detailed information about setting them up to use the android development toolkits you have installed. These IDE's are called: Eclipse, IntelliJIDEA, and NetBeans respectively. You can find more info and download links for these IDE's on the
Essentials page.