I need to write a few simple programs for android, but I'm afraid its ide wouldn't run on my computer.

Maybe I can use a text editor for this?

By the way, how would you install android programs without internet? I used one site for that (to download apk), but I suspect it installs malware. Also my android version is quite old.

vivik wrote:

I need to write a few simple programs for android, but I'm afraid its ide wouldn't run on my computer. Maybe I can use a text editor for this? By the way, how would you install android programs without internet? I used one site for that (to download apk), but I suspect it installs malware. Also my android version is quite old.

I tried to make Android Studio work at two different machines with about a two-year gap between my attempts. It never got off the ground (hanging itself when Build button was pressed even with default installation parameters and minimal project template!) and was slow as f&$king holy crap of a turtle.

There were a few articles in Google about building your application with command-line tools (without the IDE), but I guess, it won’t be easy due to little to no proper documentation for this way of doing things. Not even to mention that you will have to deal with Java infrastructure although internally it is not Java anymore.

Hi, I've had to setup Android Studio with Appium, custom frameworks, and emulators at work (iOS too). It was very painful to get setup on this work computer, which is not too new, but not that slow either in general.

The AVD emulator takes up a ton of hard drive space. Android Studio takes up a lot of resources too, I believe, but maybe just memory. I found the Android Studio documentation to be confusing when we were first getting this setup. If you have a physical Android device, it should be faster. The emulator crashes on first load pretty much every time for me, I need to make sure the window has focus too haha.

Each of the packages in the IDE will probably need to download the correct updates before first use, and I remember a lot of waiting, trying to figure out what version was need for what, restarting, etc. I think the API version we got setup was 26, Oreo or something.

Good luck, I still work with it every other day and can check any settings if needed.

i use this https://cordova.apache.org with Android sdk, no ide,

you could install your program directly to your Android, just set the mobile phone to developer mode,

fyi, i tried with sdk emulator, no issue, btw, i use linux porteus, basically, they all run in memory, rarely touching hard disk io unless got rw operations,

I use Android Studio for daily work, on a i5 notebook with 8 GB RAM, running 64-bit Windows 10.
Not bad, doubling the RAM may give smoother developing experience.

But what about folks who don't have powerful machine? Hmm this can be challenging.
You may create Android projects from command line (not sure if this is still supported on current Android SDK, though).
And whenever possible, don't run/debug your programs on AVDs. Use real Android devices instead. Make sure developer mode is enabled.

My android version is 2.3.4, so it's from 2010. And android studio appeared in 2014, before that people used android sdk and eclipse ide.

What version of sdk I should use? This page https://developer.android.com/sdk/older_releases doesn't seem to provide the needed version, it tells me to install the latest android studio first.

This is called "level 10 api".

EDIT: found!

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27043522/where-can-i-download-an-older-version-of-the-android-sdk

https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platforms#2.3.3

http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r12-windows.zip

Looked into Apache's Cordova, Porteus, PhoneGap, and GapDebug (which is at end-of-life). Cordova seemed neat, though more geared towards cross-platform mobile apps? Native Android was mentioned as an alternative, though you could mix them (not sure how much you could mix them)?

In terms of performance, I've been making sure no other big apps are running while the Android setup is going, and it's getting more manageable. Some numbers:

Emulator (AVD) in user/.android: 2.9GB on disk.
Closing emulator reduces pagefile by 2GB
Whenever I just need the Emulator, I close Android Studio & AVD Mgr. Currently, these take up: 1.2GB in memory.
Broken down as: 892MB Android Studio, 420MB OpenJDK Platform binary

The emulator still crashes whenever it first loads, but much less frustrated these days. Also found some really good links on debugging (Appium's inspector wasn't cutting it for me):
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/remote-debugging/
https://developer.android.com/studio/debug/dev-options

React Native, anyone?
You only need one JS codebase, which is ready to be deployed to both Android and iOS.

Well, from a certain point of view, this is very handy.
There's no need to master different languages (Java/Kotlin for Android, and Objective-C/Swift for iOS)

TmX wrote:

React Native, anyone? You only need one JS codebase, which is ready to be deployed to both Android and iOS. Well, from a certain point of view, this is very handy. There's no need to master different languages (Java/Kotlin for Android, and Objective-C/Swift for iOS)

Cool! I might try it. Android IDE is bloatware! I gave up after a few days. I hate Java. If only fasm could ....

Webbrowser and javascript based devtools sound like a good path to bloat... I just need to compile a simple video player for android.