Android SDK setup

This document aims to provide a guide to setup the android sdk without android studio, for example if you want to develop flutter apps in vscode.

Install sdkmanager

First you need the sdkmanager to download and manage all the other tools like the android emulator. Go to the download page and download page (https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html#command-tools) and download sdk-tools-linux-*.zip.

The folder must be called: cmdline-tools/latest, we will put it to ~/bin.

Note: You will need to add $HOME/bin/cmdline-tools/latest/bin:$HOME/bin/emulator to your PATH

Install android dev tools using sdkmanager

Now we need to install the required tools to create an android emulator:

# list available emulators
sdkmanager --list

# install an emulator
sdkmanager "system-images;android-30;google_apis;x86_64" "platforms;android-30" "build-tools;30.0.3" "platform-tools"

Create an android emulator

Now we can create an android emulator to develop our apps:

avdmanager create avd -n test -k "system-images;android-30;google_apis;x86_64"

Start the emulator

Finally we can start and use our emulator:

emulator @test

To use the emulator with flutter run:

flutter emulators --launch test