A.3. Obtaining and installing the Android SDK

The Android SDK is available as a free download from a link on the Android home page, at http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html. SDK installation versions are available for multiple platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X (Intel x86 only), and Linux (i386). Select the latest version of the SDK for the desired platform.

The Android SDK is a compressed folder download. Download and extract the contents of the compressed folder file to a convenient place on your computer. For example, you might install the SDK to C:\software\google\android-sdk-windows on a Windows machine, or /somefolder/android-sdk-mac_86 on a Mac, as shown in figure A.5.