Android Studio is now installed on the system. Although it is now the official Android IDE, we are not going to use it much throughout the book because of its lack of support of the NDK. It is, however, absolutely possible to use Android Studio for Java development, and command line or Eclipse for C/C++.
The Android SDK has been set up through the Android Studio package. An alternative solution consists of manually deploying the SDK standalone package provided by Google. On the other hand, the Android NDK has been deployed manually from its archive. Both the SDK and NDK are made available through the command line thanks to a few environment variables.
To get a fully functional environment, all Android packages have been downloaded thanks to the Android SDK manager, which aims at managing all the platforms, sources, samples, and emulation features available through the SDK. This tool greatly simplifies the update of your environment when new SDK API and components are released. There is no need to reinstall or overwrite anything!
However, the Android SDK Manager does not manage the NDK, which explains why we downloaded it separately, and why you will need to update it manually in the future.
Tip
Installing all Android packages is not strictly necessary. Only the SDK platform (and possibly Google APIs) releases targeted by your application are really required. Installing all packages may avoid troubles when importing other projects or samples though.
The installation of your Android development environment is not over yet. We still need one more thing to develop comfortably with the NDK.
Note
This is the end of the section dedicated to the Windows setup. The following section is dedicated to OS X.
Apple computers have a reputation for being simple and easy to use. I must say that this adage is rather true when it comes to Android development. Indeed, as a Unix-based system, OS X is well adapted to run the NDK toolchain.
The following section explains how to set up the prerequisite packages on Mac OS X Yosemite.