Skip to content

Android app development

André Pedersen edited this page Aug 17, 2023 · 1 revision

Setup IDE

Personally, I prefer to use Android Studio for developing mobile apps, as it is free, extremely easy to use, and rich with user-friendly features.

The Flutter documentations contain a lot of detailed information on how to do this (see here for more details).

  1. Install Android Studio by going here and download.

  2. After finished downloading, run the installer and follow the instructions.

  3. After installation, open Android Studio, which should prompt the IDE.

Setup Flutter

Flutter is a framework for mobile app development, which is based on the Dart programming language. Hence, to make Flutter apps, you will need to install the Flutter and Dart plugins to Android Studio. This can be achieved in the two following steps:

  1. Open plugin preferences (File > Settings > Plugins).

  2. Select Marketplace, select the Flutter plugin and click Install.

Note: Here we assume that you are using Windows for development! Development on Linux or macOS is perfectly possible, but then expect the steps to differ slightly (especially for macOS!).

Setup simple test app + virtual mobile device

To get started using Android Studio, it is beneficial to start with an example.

How to setup a simple test app and run it in Android Studio is described here.

It also includes information on how to setup a virtual device, which will enable you to run the app in a virtual machine and display the screen in real time, even as you are developing the code!

Below is an example of how it might look, when you first connect the virtual device (in this case I used Google Pixel):

IDE_development_virtual_device_test

And below is how it might look like when you are running the app with the virtual device.

Note that in this case, we use the test app located in the sw_app directory:

running_app_in_virtual_device