

The emulator is far from perfect, quite slow, and sometimes not responsive. Having a phone to run your app is certainly going to be nicer and faster to develop.

Yelliver mentionned the tools to build the app from the command line, there are also tools to create the project structure and the basic build files: (this documentation appears not to be entirely up-to-date, though, as it mentions the old project.properties format) You only have to launch Gradle with the appropriate command to compile your app.

So technically, you don't need an IDE at all.īasically, every project has at least a adle file that contains the instructions to build it. The good thing since the transition to android studio is that now the building of an android project is done using Gradle and can be piloted entirely by command line.
