If you’re having any trouble with the initial Android development environment setup, your first Android app, or the OpenXC Android tutorial, some of these troubleshooting tips may help.

If you have more tips to add, please fork the website on GitHub and send a pull request!

Android App Components

At a high level, an Android app contains:

• Activities - each “screen” in an Android app is considered an “Activity”
• Layout - each activity has a layout, defined in XML files, which sets up what UI elements are in that activity and how they’re positioned
• String resources - you can hard-code a string in the layout, but it’s good practice to use an @string variable instead (for string re-use and internationalization, primarily). These are stored in res/values/strings.xml.
• Java sources files - point out that we didn’t actually have to modify any Java code to get this Hello World working. There is some Java in this app, in src - we’ll get to modifying that in Part 2.

Android Emulator

If you don’t have a physical Android device and are using the software emulator, when you create the Android Virtual Device (AVD), set the RAM size to 512MB and not 1024MB, otherwise you will most likely get memory allocation failures in Windows.

Android Devices

Make sure you enable USB debugging on your Android device - the option is at Settings -> Developer Tools -> USB debugging or Settings -> Applications -> Developer Options -> USB debugging.

If there is no Developer Tools option and you have a very recent Android device, it’s hidden by default - enable it by going to Settings -> About Phone and clicking Build Number 7 times (no, I’m not kidding!).

If you are using Windows and even after enabling USB debugging your device is not recognized, it may require Windows drivers from the specific manufacturer. Google is your best friend here, as unfortunately the variations are endless.