Android Platform Guide

android-platform-guide

android-platform-guide

android-platform-guide

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A brief overview of install and setup for Android with Cordova.

Intro

Check Cordova requirements

Android requirements and environment setup

Create basic app

Add Android platform

Build basic app

Emulate app

The following brief guide assumes you have Node.js, NPM, and Git installed and

working correctly on your local system. Then, you'll need to ensure you have the latest

version of Cordova installed and working correctly.

These checks and requirements are per platform, for example for development with

Android.

Initially, we can check required and installed dependencies for Cordova with the following

command,

cordovarequirements

This command will check build requirements for each install platform, e.g. Android.

Before installing and configuring Android, we need to ensure that the latest version of the

Java SDK is available,

update java to latest se version, e.g. 1.8.0_102

update ~/.bash_profile

#CreateaJAVA_HOMEvariable,locationdetermineddynamicallyaspartofinstall

exportJAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)

#AddthattotheglobalPATHvariable

Cordova - Guide - Android Platform Guide

Contents

Intro

Check Cordova requirements

Android requirements and environment setup

n.b. this will add Java path &c. for latest Java version...

Then, we can start to setup our Android environment,

download Android Studio

install and follow prompts for default install and setup

if installing just the Android SDK, add the directory location of the SDK's tools and

platform-tools to PATH

e.g.

add ANDROID_HOME to path in ~/.bash_profile

exportANDROID_HOME=~/Development/android-sdk/

exportPATH=$PATH:~/Development/android-sdk/platform-tools/

exportPATH=$PATH:~/Development/android-sdk/tools/

exportPATH=$PATH:~/Development/android-sdk/build-tools/

then setup an Android Virtual Device (AVD) for use as an emulator

follow guide at https://developer.android.com/studio/run/managing-avds.html

open Android Studio

select option for AVD manager from toolbar for open project (normally 4th from

the right)

follow prompts and choose preferred specific device or generic device type

choose required Android platform, e.g. Android 6.0, SDK 23

Or, we can issue the following command to use the AVD manager directly

androidavd

However, latest AVD definitions (incl. Nexus 5x, 6P...) are available using AVD manager via

Android Studio 2.1.

To test the new Cordova install, we can now create a simple initial app

cordovacreatetestcom.example.testTestApp

This command will create a new app with its own basic, shell template for the app's

underlying structure. The home page for this app will be stored in www/index.html.

exportPATH=${JAVA_HOME}/bin:$PATH

Create basic app

Add Android platform

For a chosen project, we can then add required platforms for our application. These are

the mobile OSs the app needs to run on, and Cordova will support. We can add the

Android platform with the following command from within the root directory of our

Cordova app,

cordovaplatformaddandroid--save

We can then check all current install platforms with the following command,

cordovaplatformls

Each platform added to a project is stored in the app's /platforms/ directory. These

files are maintained and updated as part of the build and update process run by Cordova

for the current app.

After creating our basic test app, we can now build it from the directory created for the

app.

cordovabuild

This command will build the current app for the installed platforms. However, we may also

wish to limit the scope of a given build to a specific platform, e.g.

cordovabuildandroid

We can also build our app, and then open it for testing with an installed emulator

cordovaemulateandroid

This will choose the default installed emulator for the chosen platform. However, we may

also wish to add a flag for a specific emulated device,

cordovaemulateandroid--target=Nexus_6P_API_23

This will load the app in the specific emulator for the Nexus 6P.

Example app loaded in emulator,

Build basic app

Emulate app