12 CHAPTER 1: Setting Up Your Android App Development System
If you’re on Windows and your OS is 64-bit, you would use the Windows x64 link; otherwise, you
would use the Windows x86 link. To find out what level of bit-depth your Windows OS is running at,
open the Start menu, right-click on the Computer option, and select the Properties menu option.
This will tell you all about your computer’s hardware, including if it is using a 32-bit or 64-bit CPU and
OS. Optimally, your workstation should match the bit-depth of the CPU with the bit-depth of the OS.
- Once the installation executable has downloaded, open it, and install the
latest Java SE 6u45 JDK on your system by double-clicking on the EXE file.
Remember that the reason that we did not download the JRE is because it is part of this JDK
installation.
Once Java 6u45 (or later) JDK is installed on your workstation, you can then download and install
the Android ADT Bundle from the developer.android.com web site. You can also use that same
Add or Remove Programs utility in your Control Panel that you just used to remove older Java
versions to confirm the success of the new Java installation, and to remove any older versions of any
Android development environments that might be currently installed on this Android development
workstation that we’re going to be assembling from scratch during the remainder of this chapter.
Let’s get back to work!
Android ADT Bundle: Find and Download Android’s IDE
Now we need to visit the developer.android.com web site, and download and install the Android
development environment ADT Bundle ZIP file from the /sdk/ folder of the site, at the following URL:
https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
- Click on the Get the SDK button found on the bottom left of the Android
developer web site’s home page. - This will take you to the SDK section of the web site, which says “Get the
Android SDK” at the top as shown in Figure 1-3, along with my Google
search term: Android SDK (see top left browser tab), which is another way to
find the Android developer SDK page!