This weekend I’m trying to do some serious Android development for the first time. It’s been a while since I last done mobile development, infact more than 3 years. This series of blog post is gonna cover my experiences with it.

Setting up environment

I got a HTC one S for the purpose of the development, so I went to HTC site to find the USB windows driver, which I could read in on developer.android.com that i needed to be able to debug on my phone. This driver was nowhere to be found on HTC site. Oh, well heading back stackoverflow I figured that i just needed to install http://www.htc.com/au/help/htc-one-s/#download (HTC Sync manager and then the driver would be included.

Next I went to http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html and downloaded the SDK for windows, and installed the package manager and development environments for API 16 (The version which HTC confirmed that the phone will be upgraded to), API 15 (The HTC one S version) and API 7 (My old Xperia X10 Mini’s version). Here’s a nice list of all the API versions: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/uses-sdk-element.html#ApiLevels.

Apearently I selected some HTC developer stuff in the package manager so while installing the packages I was asked to register on htcdev.com, oh well I wasn’t planing on doing any sense stuff, but I registered anyways. Afterwards also I was also asked to register at motorola, but that I skipped.

After that went on to downloaded the latest version of Eclipse Classic from this page: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/.

When that was installed it was time to download and configure the ADT (Android Development Tools) Plugin, which would allow me to debug on the phone. The installation and configuration is quite simple and described here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/installing-adt.html

Overall setting up the environment for android development is pretty easy, it took around an hour, most of that time was spent waiting for an incredibly slow download of the files for the API 15 development.