[0x56] Install Android Studio in Linux

Android Studio is a new Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. It provides new features and improvements over Eclipse ADT and will be the official Android IDE once it's ready. On top of the capabilities you expect from IntelliJ, Android Studio offers:

• Flexible Gradle-based build system.
• Build variants and multiple APK generation.
• Expanded template support for Google Services and various device types.
• Rich layout editor with support for theme editing.
• Lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility, and other problems.
• ProGuard and app-signing capabilities.
• Built-in support for Google Cloud Platform, making it easy to integrate Google Cloud Messaging and App Engine. 

When installing on any Linux variants, First, head over to Android Studio Installation instructions, and download Android Studio for you operating system via your Browser (You’ll have to accept an EULA), then open a terminal to extract it or for a quick download of version Android Studio v0.8.0 do this in your terminal then extract it:


$ wget http://dl.google.com/android/studio/install/0.8.0/android-studio-bundle-135.1245622-linux.tgz
$ tar -zxvf android-studio-bundle-135.1245622-linux.tgz

After extracting it, you can now cd into android-studio directory and again cd into bin where you can find the studio.sh shell script to run the android studio IDE.

$ cd android-studio/bin
$ ./studio.sh

After successfully running the script, a window will appear as describe above screenshot. Then you have to click on New Project... then click next several times to complete the creation of the new project. For The first time will take some time since Android Studio will download, install and configure Gradle build system.

After you finished downloading and finally configured the Gradle. You will  now see your project and edit some source code in your "MainActivity" window. If you encounter problem like failed to find android target-L it probably that your default SDK is using Android-L(API 20). Try installing that via Tools -> Android -> SDK Manager. I would recommend you to avoid API level 20 for now since we are targeting with Android KitKat (API 19) or below. To start installing/updating SDK, check the SDK Platform, ARM EABI v7a System Image, and Intel x86 Atom System Image along with Android SDK Tools under Tools tree view and click "Install packages..." button. Here's what it looks like:

Also to use the L preview sdk, try changing this line on your app's build.gradle file:

android {
compileSdkVersion 'android-L'
}

that should do the trick. use 'android-L' instead of 20.

When finally done for the install/updates of the SDK, you can now continue creating your android app. Clicking on Run -> Run app(Shift+F10) will prompt the window "Choose Device" select the Launch emulator option button  then create/specify Android virtual device. If you don't have yet a virtual device configured, click on the ellipse button and create your default virtual device.

If successfully installed and configured without problems, you can now continue on your journey in creating and start developing android apps.

A little extra step to do is saving these few lines to the following file ~/.local/share/applications/androidstudio.desktop :

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Android Studio
Comment=
Exec=/path/to/android-studio/bin/studio.sh
Icon=/path/to/android-studio/bin/idea.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Development;
StartupNotify=true

This will show up the application icon the the apps menu for you distro. This is  easier to fast-launch the IDE than echoing it to the terminal.

If you come across to any problem, please let me know if I could be of any help.