My First Android App

Yesterday, I decided to keep up with the rest of the world in some ways, so I bought a Samsung Galaxy ACE smartphone. I know, it is not a really high-end stuff, according to the current state of the smartphone market. Anyhow, I think it is a great value for 85 pounds, with a pay as you go contract. I am really impressed by this phone, and I decided, to develop a hello world application. So, I first downloaded the Android SDK. As I extracted the tar.gz, the Readme file told me how to carry on with the installation. So I followed the instructions, first with the UI:

tools/android update sdk

With the UI, I selected to install:

• Android SDK Tools
• Android SDK Platform-tools
• For Android 2.3.3
• SDK Platform
• Samples for SDK

After the process finished, the log window had a warning:

Stopping ADB server failed (code -1).

I will ignore it for now. The whole stuff is consuming around 307 megs at the moment.

cd tools
./android list targets

And I created a project:

./android create project --target "android-10" --name HelloWorldApp \
--path ~/Documents/android/workspace/HelloWorldApp \
--activity MainActivity --package eu.lakat.example.helloworldapp

Let's go back to the "root":

cd ..

I created a small script, to include all the paths in one shot:

export PATH=$PATH:"$(pwd)/android-sdk-linux/tools/":"$(pwd)/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/"

Changed the directory to the applications:

cd workspace/HelloWorldApp/

Compiled it to debug:

ant debug

And installed it on my device:

adb install bin/HelloWorldApp-debug.apk

Everything worked perfectly fine, I found the app in my device, and was able to run that easily. Cool!

Virtual device

android avd

Use th UI to create a new device, and simply execute:

adb install bin/HelloWorldApp-debug.apk