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 the 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 trouble when importing other projects or samples though.
The installation of not or 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 Linux setup. The following section is for all operating systems.
Installing the Eclipse IDE
Because of Android Studio limitations, Eclipse is still one of the most appropriate IDEs to develop native code on Android. Using an IDE is not required though; command-line lovers or vi
fanatics can skip this part!
In the following section, we will see how to set up Eclipse.