Before we start talking about all of the exciting and amazing things you can do with Android we need to make sure that you have a working environment setup. The good news is that getting setup is mostly painless. Here are the steps:
Get the Android SDK
Get Eclipse
Get the Android Eclipse Plugin
Let’s look at each of these steps in detail.
1. Get the Android SDK
First, we need to download the Android SDK. You can get it here (just select your operating system). Untar or Unzip this and put it in a folder of your choice (note the folder location, we’ll need it later). Ironically, the latest Android SDK does not actually come with an Android SDK. This is a little bit confusing, but Google is trying to provide us with tools to keep up to date instead of just giving us the actual SDK. What that means for right now, however, is that we have a little bit more work to do before we actually have the SDK. Go into the unpacked Android SDK folder and you should see a folder named Tools. Open that and run the “Android” you find in this folder. This should bring up the Android SDK Manager.
If you click on Available Packages there should be a repository listed (in mine it lists https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/repository.xml). Check the repository and click on refresh. It should give you a list of available Google APIs and Android SDKs.
If you get an error about not being able to access the repository via HTTPS click on the Settings Menu on the left. Put a checkmark next to Force https://… sources to be fetched using http://… and click Save and Apply. Go back to Available Packages and click refresh again. Put a checkmark next to the SDK you want to install, and click install selected. The SDK version you want is going to be determined by what is installed on your Android device (or your consumer’s android devices). If you don’t know, just get the latest for now. You can always come back and get other versions.
After it finishes downloading you should see the SDK listed in Installed Packages.
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