Android development is one of the major part of software development in the world now a days. Many companies in the world like to have their android application developed. Many software developers want to learn android development and work in this technology. There are many different android devices having different screen sizes and resolutions. And there are different tools that we can use in order to develop android apps. One of the most updated and famous android development tool is Android Studio. In this article android studio for beginners, I will show you the basics of how to begin with android studio and how to develop for different android versions.
Android Development Tutorial
Before moving further, you need to check few things. First of all, you need to download is jdk, to start working with android studio. Once you download jdk, you need to install it in your system and set the environment variables by going to your system properties > advance system settings > advance > environment variables > path and copy the jdk bin path as shown in the image below.
Now you need to download android studio from official android site. After downloading it, you would need to install it first in your system (with default settings). Once you install it in your PC, you will see the following screen if you open it at first.
Before proceeding further, we need to check few things first. You can see a configure tab shown on the main screen, click on this and check for updates of your android studio. I would suggest you to check it every week for new updates on this tool. If there is an update shown, just click on update and restart as shown in the image below.
Once you update your android studio, you need to update your android SDK as well. Android SDK is basically the packages of all android versions that are required to build your application for all those android versions. You can do this again in configure menu and click SDK manager to open it. Once you open it, you will see the required packages and updates that are needed to be downloaded before moving further. It might take a long time to download all of these, but I would suggest you to download all first as shown in the image below.
Now you can proceed further to start making your first android app. On the main start up screen, click on on Start a new Android Studio Project as shown in the image below.
After clicking on your new project, you will have to provide your application name, company domain name, your package name (this is to differentiate your app from other apps in android store), and the destination folder of your application. Android Studio will automatically create a package name but you can change it by clicking on Edit button as shown in the image below.
After doing all this, click on the next button at the bottom. In the next window, you need to check phone and tablet and select the minimum SDK version from the drop down. This minimum SDK shows the minimum android version that you application will run on. I would suggest you to select Android 4.0 (IceCreamSandwich). If you want to set your own minimum sdk version, I would suggest you to first click on “Help me choose” link to see how many devices run on each android version in order to choose your minimum sdk version.
Click next, and you would need to select the default activity for your android app. Activity is basically a page for your app, like a game menu is one activity, game stats screen is another activity etc. Android Studio provides you with many default activities having some default pre written functionalities in it. But as start up, we will select a blank activity and click next. It will show an other screen having layout name, activity name, title etc. you just need to click on finish to complete the first set up for your app.
Once you click on finish, android studio will create your first android setup and provide you the collections of tools to start making your first android application as shown in the image below.
On the left side there is a project window that shows different files in it. These files include Manifest file (which is used to configure the settings for your application), java files (which are used to write codes) and res folder which is used to define styles, graphics, music and designing you application using layouts. At the bottom, there is a folder called Gradle Scripts. This is a new functionality added in android studio to build your app packages (apk) in an efficient way (read more on Gradle from this LINK). After this (project) window, there is a tool bar with bunch of tool including buttons, text box and many other controls that we can use in our app. The mobile shows the layout of your application and in our case we just have a text block saying hello world. All the elements which are defined here in order to design the layout of your application use XML. If you want to see the XML version of this default layout, you can click on the Text tab (with the design tab) at the bottom of above image.
There are bunch of other tools that I would like you to explore your self, as these tools automatically understood as we start making our apps. In this part, I have just shown you, how to make your first application project. In this Android Development Tutorial – part 2, I will show you how to add some elements on the activity and adding the java code on those elements to make those elements in a working condition.
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