Installing the Tools

First, let us get you set up with the pieces and parts necessary to build an Android app. Specifically, in this tutorial, we will set up Android Studio.

Step #1: Checking Your Hardware

Compiling and building an Android application, on its own, can be a hardware-intensive process, particularly for larger projects. Beyond that, your IDE and the Android emulator will stress your development machine further. Of the two, the emulator poses the bigger problem.

The more RAM you have, the better. 8GB or higher is a very good idea if you intend to use an IDE and the emulator together. If you can get an SSD for your data storage, instead of a conventional hard drive, that too can dramatically improve the IDE performance.

A faster CPU is also a good idea. The Android SDK emulator supports CPUs with multiple cores. However, other processes on your development machine will be competing with the emulator for CPU time, and so the faster your CPU is, the better off you will be. Ideally, your CPU has 4 or more cores, each 2.5GHz or faster at their base speed.

There are two types of emulator: x86 and ARM. These are the two major types of CPUs used for Android devices. You really want to be able to use the x86 emulator, as the ARM emulator is extremely slow. However, to do that, you need a CPU with certain features:

If your CPU does not meet those requirements, you will want to have one or more Android devices available to you, so that you can test on hardware.

Also, if you are running Windows or Linux, you need to ensure that your computer’s BIOS is set up to support the Intel/AMD virtualization extensions. Unfortunately, many PC manufacturers disable this by default. The details of how to get into your BIOS settings will vary by PC, but usually it involves rebooting your computer and pressing some function key on the initial boot screen. In the BIOS settings, you are looking for references to “virtualization” (or perhaps “VT-x” for Intel). Enable them if they are not already enabled. macOS machines come with virtualization extensions pre-enabled, which is really nice of Apple.

Note that Apple M1 chip support is still a work in progress. While Android Studio Arctic Fox appears to have M1 support, it also appears that this support is a bit rough in spots. Hopefully, this will smooth out with future versions of Android Studio.