Get Started with the Android SDKįor this project, you’ll need to download the Android SDK. To see all of this in action, let’s get to building our code base from the ground up, first installing the SDK, then initializing gradle, onto converting to an Android build, and finally writing the app code. And adle tells Gradle how to convert your source into an APK using the Gradle Android plugin. Src/ contains your Java source code, the resources you use like layouts and configuration files, and the AndroidManifest which tells Android what your app is. So it’s just src/ and adle that are important. gitignore is use for source control, if you didn’t know that already. You don’t need this file (it’s actually all commented out). ProGuard helps shrink your final APK by removing unused libraries. Inside the app folder you’ll find two directories and three files: idea/ which is where IntelliJ (which Android Studio is built on) stores configuration files. What does that leave us with? Just the app/ folder and some files in.

idea/.Īlso, local.properties aren’t important either, as well as build/. If you Google what iml files are for you will see they are used by Android Studio and can be regenerated from the configurations in. Let’s look at what files are not included in source control by looking at. Clearly the main complexity in Android projects is the build system. What do we have without any Gradle files ? The first thing to notice is that most files involve Gradle, the system for configuring and executing builds. This is what Android Studio creates when you start a completely bare project. Note: I’ll be doing this on Windows but most instructions should work on other platforms. We won’t assume any previous Android experience, just a little Java. Software development is about files and in this tutorial we’re going to go through every file in a basic Android project – first by examining what Android Studio outputs and then by building up an Android project from scratch.

The components that make up an Android Studio project.

This isn’t great for learning since you don’t see how things work, namely Virtually every Android tutorial uses Android Studio to create and develop an app.

Android studio online