Hi guys, long time no see! (I was pretty active a few years ago on this forum ). Anyway, long story short, I want to make apps for my android phone, but after following some tutorials and ending up cloging my hard drive for nothing, i can't seem to be able to put all the pieces together concerning all the crap to install, since there's always something that changed since when the tutorial was wrote, or stuffs like that. Im usually not a noob to this kind of things but it seem there's always something going wrong when i try (it's like the modules im installing in eclipse just never end, im always missing something, argggg!)

Let's say i start a fresh copy of Win7 in VMWare, can somebody tell me the EXACT steps to perform, in order, so that i can compile an app without problem, i know im asking a lot, but i believe that's a fair thing to ask, since it might help others peoples that land to this post too. I would really like a recipe kind of answer, lol.

Also, i know this sound dumb, but anyway, i have no idea how the compilation work, wich file or files get created as output, and, the most important, how the heck do i load this thing in the cellphone, do i HAVE to use google store, or is it optional? Im used as a win32 programmer, i know almost nothing yet of android platform ) .

Im not in a hurry for an answer, so take all the time you need to give a detailled explanation please (otherwise im back to square one!)

Thx in advance for your time.

Thankfully Android app development is extremely easy to setup! Just make sure you have a good understanding of JAVA.

All you need to do is install Android Studio: https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html

Then make a Google Developer account and pay the one time fee if you wish to upload your application to the GooglePlay store. You don't require any of this to test and run your applications on either the emulator, or a connected device.

Once you have Android Studio you're going to want the Libraries that match the lowest version you're going to support on your applications: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html I would suggest getting the intel haxm in the SDK Manager to run your emulation faster.

If you have an Android phone, all you need to do is active developer mode: https://developer.android.com/studio/debug/dev-options.html

Once you connect your phone, you can just run the applications there. However, you'll want to setup Virtual Devices that run in the many different variations of phone sizes, and density as your layouts will need to support several sizes. You manage this through the AVD Manager.

From there, just make sure you're familiar with the IDE, and you're good to go. Read up on Gradle files as well for managing your builds.

I'm not sure this will work on Virtual Machines as I run a Windows 10 Machine. Also, toss eclipse out the window, people shouldn't be using this, it's no longer supported. As long as you have enough ram you'll be fine with Android Studio 2+

I don't have enough time right now to get into the specifics of layout design, managing naming conventions for those folders for different drawables, and screen size layouts, but it wont take long if you just look up some Android Studio YouTube videos on different screen sizes, and dpi.

Thanx, great reply.

i'll start looking into that right now .

You might want to consider using an engine, and/or something like Xamarin.

Engines such as Unity or UE4 natively support android and hide you from the details that cause aggrivation. As you've mentioned, android is a fluid OS which continually changes it's APIs, and support for various things varies from device to device. There's such a disparity of different OS versions (from some ancient phones still running 2.3 gingerbread and latest flagship devices potentially running 8.0 oreo) that it just becomes a pain in the ass and you end up buying 30 different devices for testing your apps on.

If it was up to me i'd be looking at using an engine to eliminate some of these complications...

Hope this helps!