Installing the Android SDK and Linking It with Eclipse

This tutorial is long so that it’s precise and everything ends up working perfectly. If it’s any consolation, once you know how to do it, what is described here takes 5 minutes.

In this tutorial we’re going to show how to install the Android SDK in version r20 -later versions should work too, but with older ones some things change slightly- on Eclipse Indigo -It’s the same in earlier versions of Eclipse, only the data download links that we’ll see later change, and it’s also the same with later versions such as Eclipse Juno.

Because of changes in Android and Eclipse versions, the installation method tends to vary. So we’ll try to keep this tutorial as up to date as possible with the latest versions.

To begin, let’s make sure that we have Eclipse installed -it’s required, since the Android SDK is a plugin for it; in other words, it’s a tool that comes separately- along with Java and the Java JDK, from the previous tutorial.

We continue by downloading the Android SDK from: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

We run the installer and click “Next” once.

If the installer detects that the Java JDK is installed, that’s the ideal case, and we click “Next” again.

Once you get to the point of choosing a path, I strongly recommend that you install it directly in the root of the drive that boots the operating system, to avoid future problems. That’s usually the “C” drive. Typing “C:android-sdk” is enough to create a folder called “android-sdk”.

We click “Next” as many times as needed until it’s installed. When the installation finishes and the installer reaches the end and asks whether we want to run the SDK -make sure the “Start SDK Manager (to dwnload system images, etc.)” box is checked- we click Finish.

At this point we’ll have installed the Android SDK. A part of the SDK called “Android SDK Manager” will open. It will be empty, meaning it doesn’t have any Android operating system as such.

We wait for the bar to finish searching the Internet for what we can download. For the emulator to work, we need at least one operating system.

When it finishes searching, some options will already be checked for installation. By default it will want to install the USB drivers, so you can test your apps on a physical Android device if you have one, and the latest Android version to date.

Although the latest Android version sounds very tempting, using it means accepting a number of problems:

1. If your computer isn’t very powerful, you may despair at how slow the Android emulator will run with the new operating system.
2. If you want to upload the app you develop for this version to the Market (it’s called Play now), you’ll find that very few people will download it, since almost nobody has the latest version until nearly a year after it comes out.

So I recommend betting big and installing version 2.1 as a minimum, which ensures a fast emulator and that your app can be used by many people. Newer versions of Android run apps written for older versions of the operating system, but not the other way around. And if we look at the Android version usage chart, it pays off today, since it covers close to 90% of the market: Distribution dashboard (Android Developers)

So if we want to install 2.1, for example, we check its box. And we check any other boxes that might interest us. We can check them all to try things out, but it will download several gigabytes -everything is a bit more than 4 GB. So I recommend thinking it over, depending on what we want, the time we have, and our internet connection.

We click the “install X packages…” button. A new window will open where we’ll accept everything -you can click “Acept All”- we click “Install” -if it doesn’t let us, it’s because some package depends on another one that isn’t installed; we note which one it is, cancel, uncheck its box, and redo the steps- and we wait.

During the installation, a dialog box may open asking for a username and password among other information; since we don’t have any of that, we click “Cancel”. That part won’t be installed (it’s not important, those are private and some are paid), and the rest will continue.

While it installs, let me point out that we have two programs that are separate and not linked at all:

1. On one side we have the Android SDK -the window that is downloading is the download wizard, which is part of the Android SDK.
2. On the other side we have Eclipse. If we open it, we’ll see there’s nothing new. That means nothing is linked with Eclipse, so we need to link them so they recognize each other.

When everything we want has been downloaded, we close the “Android SDK Manager” window.

Now we’ll work with Eclipse, and we need to link the SDK to our development environment. This is done by installing an Eclipse plugin called ADT (Android Developent Tools). It makes sense that the plugin is the Android development tools, since Eclipse as a working environment needs these tools, which it doesn’t have, to program for Android.

In the menu we go to “Help”, and there we choose “Install New Software…”

A new window will open. We click “Add…”, and in the small pop-up window that appears we enter the name we want the plugin to have -for example: "ADT to link with the Android SDK". In the URL field, we enter the following address to download the ADT plugin:

https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/

When we’re done, we accept the small pop-up window.

Now we check the “Developer Tools” box so that everything under it gets checked, and we click Next.

In the next step we just click Next.

We’ll reach another step where we have to accept the license, and then we click Finish.

The installation will then begin. Halfway through, a warning window will probably appear telling us there is unsigned content that can’t be validated; we simply click “OK” and wait for it to finish.

When it finishes, it will ask us to restart Eclipse. We tell it to restart now.

When Eclipse restarts, a window will ask whether we want to install the SDK. The SDK is already installed, so we click “Use existing SDKs” and choose the folder where we installed the SDK earlier.

The next window will ask whether we want to send usage statistics to Google. If we want to help Google, we say yes; otherwise, no, and we click Finish.

Eclipse and the Android SDK are now linked.

With a quick look at Eclipse, we’ll see the newly installed tools, which we can access from several places.

The Android icons don’t appear: The icons for the Android SDK Manager and the AVD Manager (Android Virtual Device Manager) may not show up. To see them, you can find out how to make them appear in this other article.

Everything is installed. Now it’s time to prepare the tools of our development environment and get to know them. Keep going in the next article, about how to prepare the tools you need to program in Android.

Note: the Android emulator usually takes quite a while to load and is generally slow. You can see how to configure the Android emulator to run much faster in this article.