Steele Bit programming & development musings by Andrew Steele

Setting up an Android development environment is not a terribly hard task, but there are several steps involved. Before I document those steps a note about the hardware I used for my forays into Android development.
Development Machine Specs

• Windows 7 64 bit
• Processor: Intel Core  Duo T9800 @ 2.93GHz 2.94GHz
• RAM: 4.00 GB

Android Platforms

• Motorola Droid
• HTC Incredible

The following steps are merely the ones that I used to develop Proximity Alerter and are definitely not the only options for setting up an Android development environment. Accounting for download and installation time the following steps should take less than 2 hours.

1. Step 1 - Android SDK & Components
   
   • Download and install the Android SDK
   • Once the SDK has been installed, you'll need to manually add the 2.1 platform and Google APIs, see Adding Android SDK Components
2. Step 2 - Phone Drivers
   
   • Download and install the Motorola Mobile Phone USB Driver
     
   • At the time of this writing I could not find an easily downloadable HTC driver but the Installing HTC Incredible Android SDK Drivers instructions provided by Andrew Westberg work.
3. Step 3 - Setup Android Devices for Debugging
   
   • On the device, go to the home screen, press MENU, select Applications > Development, then check all three options
4. Step 4 - Setup MOTODEV Studio (a fully contained Eclipse plug-in) for Android
   
   • Download and install MOTODEV Studio for Android (might require account creation)
     
   • Start MOTODEV Studio for Android, create a new workspace
   • Select: "Use an existing SDK from the file system" and point MOTODEV Studio to the location where you installed the Android SDK

At this point your Android development environment is setup and ready for the obligatory Hello, World.