Install the Android Studio from the official website.Google doesn't provide the SDK as a standalone installation package any longer. The Android SDK installation is trickier. JDK version, especially if you have multiple JDK versions installed. This is not mandatory, but it can help the Java tools locate the correct

A good practice is to configure theĮnvironment variable JAVA_HOME to point to the Java installation location (without including the bin subdirectory). Make sure to install the Java Development Kit (JDK), not just the runtime (JRE or Java SE Runtime). If you don't already have a JDK 1.6 or later installed you can download it from Necessary tools to convert the bytecode to Dex format (Dalvik Android virtual machine), align and sign the APK. Used to generate the certificate for the APK signing as well, which is mandatory to create a release APK version. The JDK is necessary to compile the Java code and pack the binaries. Or maybe you are just curious to learn how the APK building process works under the hood.Īs mentioned earlier, we'll need the JDK and the Android SDK only. Old school programmers just hate the graphical environments.Full control of the building process is necessary to avoid any autogenerated code as much as possible.You are developing your own IDE or some other kind of APK building tool.So, ignoring all those benefits and resorting to the command line is not recommended,īut there are a few reasons why this can be necessary: In this article we'll use Windows, but the same commands can be adapted toĪn Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Android Studio can automate all these steps into a single click, highlight the language syntax,Īssist with debugging, among many-many other useful features.

Necessary tools will be the Java Developer Kit (JDK) and the Android SDK. Omitting all these tools is not a good practice, but it is fine for our minimalistic APK. We won't use Gradle, Proguard and Bundle Tool. In order to keep this process as simple as possible Let's build a simple 'Hello World' APK for Android using command line tools only, without IDE.

Android studio build release apk