Link to the Android Studio That You Are Teaching

As Android Studio evolves — new templates, new layout editors, etc. — tutorials and training based around older Android Studio versions become stale. This confuses many newcomers to Android development, leading to frustrated developers coming to Stack Overflow and elsewhere, asking why Android Studio does not work as it should. Android Studio may be fine, but it may be different than what the book, YouTube video, or blog post was depicting.

For seasoned developers, this is nothing new. Adapting to changing tools is part of software development. But not everyone coming to Android development is a seasoned developer.

I had not realized until today that Google maintains a list of download links for past Android Studio versions.

If you produce educational materials — particularly tutorials, training courses, books, and other long-form stuff — please link to the specific Android Studio version that you are teaching. I need to do this, and will do so starting with my next book update.

This way, somebody learning from you can use the same Android Studio, with the same UI, the same templates, and so forth. Later on, when the developer gains greater comfort with Android development and Android Studio in particular, the developer can jump onto the latest version and keep up to date via the stable channel.

If you are helping out on Stack Overflow and elsewhere, and you run into somebody who is confused by the differences between their educational materials and the current Android Studio, consider pointing them to the older Android Studio downloads.

And many thanks to the incompletely-redacted Google engineer who pointed out the downloads link!