FYI: sdkmanager for Command-Line SDK Installs

In version 25.2.3 of the SDK Tools package, Google quietly slipped in sdkmanager, a command-line tool for installing SDK packages. This is documented, though I do not recall seeing an announcement about it.

If you have been struggling to keep the old android command going for command-line SDK work — for example, for CI server configuration — it would appear that sdkmanager is at least the near-term replacement.

sdkmanager itself gets installed to $ANDROID_SDK/tools/bin/, where $ANDROID_SDK is wherever you have the Android SDK installed. This appears to be a new directory; leastways, in my environment, sdkmanager is the only thing in there. Hence, you might not have this directory in your PATH.

sdkmanager is not perfect. For example, the output of --list is simultaneously not very human readable and not very machine readable. But, it is what we have.