Android Studio for beginners, Part 1: Download Android Development Series #04

• Android Studio for beginners, Part 1: Download 

  Android Development Series #04 

If you're new to Android Studio, this tutorial series will get you started. I'll briefly introduce the Android development platform, then show you how to download, install, and run the software. After that, we'll spend most of our time actually using Android Studio to develop an animated mobile app. In Part 1 you'll start up your first Android project and get to know the project workspace in Android Studio. 

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After you're comfortable with developing a basic mobile app in Android Studio, we'll explore more advanced topics like debugging, performance monitoring, and profiling with Android Studio. We'll also look at extending Android Studio with three useful plugins.

Get started with Android Studio

Android Studio is Google's officially supported IDE for developing Android apps. Based on IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio is freely available under Apache License 2.0. The most recent stable version, 2.1.1, includes the following features:

• A unified environment where you can develop for all Android devices.
• Support for building Android TV apps and Android Wear apps.
• Template-based wizards to create common Android designs and components.
• A rich layout editor that lets users drag-and-drop user interface components, and that offers an option to preview layouts on multiple screen configurations.
• Android-specific refactoring and quick fixes.
• Gradle-based build support.
• Lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility, and other problems.
• ProGuard integration and app-signing capabilities.
• A fast and feature-rich emulator.
• Instant Run to push changes to your running app without building a new APK (Application PacKage Zip file).
• Built-in support for Google Cloud Platform, enabling integration with Google Cloud Messaging and App Engine.
• C++ and NDK support.
• Plugin architecture for extending Android Studio via plugins.

Download Android Studio

Google provides Android Studio for the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. You can download this software from the Android Studio homepage. (You'll also find the traditional SDKs, with Android Studio's command-line tools, available from the Downloads page.) Before downloading Android Studio, make sure your platform meets one of the following requirements:

Windows OS

• Microsoft Windows 7/8/10 (32-bit or 64-bit)
• 2 GB RAM minimum, 8 GB RAM recommended
• 2 GB of available disk space minimum, 4 GB Recommended (500 MB for IDE + 1.5 GB for Android SDK and emulator system image)
• 1280 x 800 minimum screen resolution
• JDK 8
• For accelerated emulator: 64-bit operating system and Intel processor with support for Intel VT-x, Intel EM64T (Intel 64), and Execute Disable (XD) Bit functionality

Mac OS

• Mac OS X 10.8.5 or higher, up to 10.11.4 (El Capitan)
• 2 GB RAM minimum, 8 GB RAM recommended
• 2 GB of available disk space minimum, 4 GB Recommended (500 MB for IDE + 1.5 GB for Android SDK and emulator system image)
• 1280 x 800 minimum screen resolution
• JDK 6

Linux OS

• GNOME or KDE desktop: Tested on Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin (64-bit distribution capable of running 32-bit applications)
• 64-bit distribution capable of running 32-bit applications
• GNU C Library (glibc) 2.11 or later
• 2 GB RAM minimum, 8 GB RAM recommended
• 2 GB of available disk space minimum, 4 GB Recommended (500 MB for IDE + 1.5 GB for Android SDK and emulator system image)
• 1280 x 800 minimum screen resolution
• JDK 8
• For accelerated emulator: Intel processor with support for Intel VT-x, Intel EM64T (Intel 64), and Execute Disable (XD) Bit functionality, or AMD processor with support for AMD Virtualization (AMD-V)

Once you've ensured your operating system is compatible with Android Studio 2.1.1, download the appropriate Android Studio distribution file. The Android Studio download page auto-detected that I'm running 64-bit Windows 8.1 and selected android-studio-bundle-143.2821654-windows.exe for me to download.