Installing the Android SDK

The Android Software Development Kit (SDK) is all you need to develop applications

for Android. The SDK comes with a set of tools as well as a platform to run it and see

it all work. You can download the Android SDK for your particular platform from the

Android SDK Download page.

Once you download it, unzip (or on Linux, untar) it into a folder that is easy to get to. Further examples in the book will assume your SDK is in the folder ~/android-sdk. If it’s in a different location, use that location instead of ~/android-sdk. For example:

Windows     C:\apps\android-sdk-windows Linux     /home/YourUserName/android-sdk-linux_86 Mac OS X     /Users/YourUserName/android-sdk-mac_86

For Windows users, I strongly recommend choosing directories without spaces in them. This is because we’ll be doing work on the command line and spaces just complicate things. Because the Windows XP home directory is in C:\Documents and Settings, I would recommend putting android-sdk in a top-level directory that you create, such as C:\apps.

However, on Windows Vista or 7, you can simply extract android-sdk into C:\Users\YourUserName.