How to Download and Get Started with Android Studio

One of the biggest announcements from Google out of the first day of the keynote has been the brand new development environment, called Android Studio.

Android Studio is a new Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. Similar to Eclipse with the ADT Plugin, Android Studio provides integrated Android developer tools for development and debugging. On top of the capabilities you expect from IntelliJ, Android Studio offers:

• Gradle-based build support.
• Android-specific refactoring and quick fixes.
• Lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility and other problems.
• ProGuard and app-signing capabilities.
• Template-based wizards to create common Android designs and components.
• A rich layout editor that allows you to drag-and-drop UI components, preview layouts on multiple screen configurations, and much more.

Download Android Studio

[box title=”Download Android Studio v0.1” color=”#2b24ff”]

Click on the buttons to download Android Studio on your Computer, choose which platform you are using

[button link=”http://dl.google.com/android/studio/android-studio-bundle-130.677228-windows.exe” color=”#ff14e8″ size=”3″ style=”1″ dark=”0″ radius=”auto” target=”blank”]Windows[/button] [button link=”http://dl.google.com/android/studio/android-studio-bundle-130.677228-mac.dmg” color=”#ff14e8″ size=”3″ style=”1″ dark=”0″ radius=”auto” target=”blank”]Mac OS X[/button] [button link=”http://dl.google.com/android/studio/android-studio-bundle-130.677228-linux.tgz” color=”#ff14e8″ size=”3″ style=”1″ dark=”0″ radius=”auto” target=”blank”]Linux[/button] [/box]

This download includes:

• Android Studio early access preview
• All the Android SDK Tools to design, test, debug, and profile your app
• The latest Android platform to compile your app
• The latest Android system image to run your app in the emulator

Installing Android Studio

1. Download the Android Studio package from above.
2. Install Android Studio and the SDK tools:

   Windows:

   1. Launch the downloaded EXE file, android-studio-bundle-<version>.exe.
   2. Follow the setup wizard to install Android Studio.

   Known issue: On some Windows systems, the launcher script does not find where Java is installed. If you encounter this problem, you need to set an environment variable indicating the correct location.

   Select Start menu > Computer > System Properties > Advanced System Properties. Then open Advanced tab > Environment Variables, add new system variable JAVA_HOME that points to your JDK folder, for example C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_21.

   Mac OS X:

   1. Open the downloaded DMG file, android-studio-bundle-<version>.dmg.
   2. Drag and drop Android Studio into the Applications folder.

   Linux:

   1. Unpack the downloaded Tar file, android-studio-bundle-<version>.tgz, into an appropriate location for your applications.
   2. To launch Android Studio, navigate to the android-studio/bin/ directory in a terminal and execute studio.sh.You may want to add android-studio/bin/ to your PATH environmental variable so that you can start Android Studio from any directory.

That’s it! You’re ready to start developing apps with Android Studio.