So it’s been about 8 years since I last did “Hello World” in an Android app. My experience then was that it took about 2 hours to install Java, Eclipse and the Android SDK, 10 minutes to write “Hello World”, by point it was bedtime and I never touched it again.

Since then I’ve been developing in Java quite a lot at work, and become fairly proficient in IntelliJ. I’m also using Ubuntu for my work laptop day to day. That said, installing JDKs always seems to be a confusing exercise, so let see how this goes.

First step lots of Googling. Judicious use of the “Search Tools” button and “Past Year” filter removes all the ancient fossilised guides from 2011 that are unfathomably still the top ranked results.

I already have IntelliJ 14 installed, so I downloaded the “SDK Tools Only” option from the developer section of Android.com

OK, so the downloads is a .tgz, no-one understands tar (certainly not me), so back to the googles. I tripped over this recent tutorial on android forums. Looks right on the money.

Install ia32-libs-multiarch. apt couldn’t find the package:

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Unable to locate package ia32-libs-multiarch

Bit more searching and I’m now confused about multiarch, google seems to happily return old not-quite-matching results. I possibly need to add a foreign architecure. I’m skipping over this for now, it will probably bite me later.

Un-tarred the download

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tar xzvf android-sdk_r24.0.2-linux.tgz

Fired up the GUI sdk installer:

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cd ~/android-sdk-linux/tools
./android

I simply went with the default selections. Installing took a while as it has to download quite a lot of the internet.

Back to IntelliJ I added the Android plugin and restarted.

I then went to create a new project, chose android “Application Module”, pretty much hit “next/next”, until I had to chose an SDK. Impasse. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where the damn SDK was installed to. My feeble attempts at using ‘find’ from bash didn’t yield anything. I restarted the SDK installer to see if it gave any clues, it didn’t, but it did offer to install the SDK. WTF. So it’s either running updates, or trying the whole install again. 20 mins later and it’s only halfway through.

It’s now late so I’m giving up, I’ll try again another day.

EDIT: OK, so the installer finished for the second time, and I noticed, that in light grey on a light grey background, it says:

SDK Path: /home/myusername/Downloads/unpack/android-sdk-linux

Embarrasing, I un-tarred in my downloads folder, assuming the install would go elsewhere, and the download could be deleted later. So now my SDK is in my downloads folder. Oh well, it worked, and IntelliJ created a project, so I’ll sort it out next time.