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Comment by mksybr | Hacker News Reader

You can build on the command line with gradle.

I did end up installing Android Studio for the sdk and virtual machine installation, but I'd assume it could be done on the command line as well.

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I don't understand why this was getting downvoted? The parent commenter is right. You can build on the command line with gradle. It will still download hundreds of megabytes worth of dependencies (the Android SDK etc). But at least you don't need any GUI tools.

It's an SDK for an entire OS, plus the emulator (basically the whole OS in a VM), developer tools and more. It's not much different in size than the SDKs for macOS or Windows and it's much more cohesive.

I've downloaded just the command-line tools before and used 'sdkmanager' to list and download sdk versions and virtual machines, so it is definitely doable without Android Studio, although it isn't obvious (or at least it wasn't to me).

I have done this, but for some reason Android SDK has to be weird, so you have to download the SDK seperately and then create a properties file in to root of the project with the path to the Android SDK. Everyone then also has to have their own version of this file, since the path is likely different. You also have to make sure that everyone downloads the same version of the SDK. (also the path to the SDK cannot have any spaces)

Why can it not be like other Gradle dependencies, where Gradle will just download the files automatically?

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