Hyper-V to Simulate a Virtual Smartphone

The first thing you need to do before you can set up your Android development environment is to enable Hyper-V. This is necessary to run a simulator for a virtual smartphone on your computer. This simulator is used later for testing the Apps you are going to develop. If you do not want to do that, you always have to use a real smartphone to run your developed Apps. So a smartphone simulator will make your developer’s life a lot easier.

To activate Hyper-V you can read our guide on how to Enable Hyper-V on Windows 11 Pro and Unlock Powerful Virtualization.

Android Studio as Android Development Environment

There are many platforms out there, where you can develop Android apps. But the best development environment will be Android Studio. It is built and distributed directly by Google, which also developed Android.

Android Studio has two major benefits:

• It is specifically designed for developing Android apps. So everything necessary is already integrated including the simulated smartphones – so there is no Plugin installation needed.
• Android Studio is built on JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA – so if you are already familiar with IntelliJ you will love Android Studio because the user interface is almost the same.

Downloading and Installing Android Studio

To download Android Studio, you first need to visit the official download site. There you should already see a Download Android Studio button in the middle of the page. When you click on that, a popup for the terms and conditions will pop up. To start the download you have to scroll down on the page, check the checkbox that you have read and agree with the terms and conditions and press Download Android Studio again. Now the download of the setup .exe file will start

After the download is complete, you can open the setup file to start the installation process. The first page you will see looks like the screenshot below. You just have to press Next.

The next window will ask you what components you want to install. There you can already define if you want to install the Android Virtual Device component as well as the Android development environment itself. If you want to use a simulated smartphone make sure that the checkbox next to the Android Virtual Device is checked and confirm your choice by pressing Next.

On the following device, you can choose your installation path. To speed up your program, I would recommend installing it on an SSD.

The next page asks you if you want to put your Android Studio application in a new Start Menu Folder or if you want to add it to an already existing one. You can choose whatever you like, change the name of the new folder, or also mark the checkbox at the bottom to not create a shortcut at all. After you have decided what you want to do, you can click on Install to start the installation process of your Android development environment.

After pressing Install, the setup will start the installation of Android Studio. When the progress bar is full and the text above it states Completed, you can press the Next button on the bottom to open the final setup window.

If you want to setup and start Android Studio right now, you have to mark the checkbox. Otherwise, you can deselect it. Either way, you need to click on Finish to complete the installation process.

Setting up Android Studio

After starting up Android Studio, you will be confronted with the importing of Android Studio settings. If you do not have exported settings from another computer or you have already installed Android Studio previously, you just have to select ‘Do not import settings’ and click on OK.

After pressing OK you will see the dialog from the screenshot below. It is asking you to send usage statistics to Google to help them improve Android Studio in the future. You can decide if you want to do that or not. In this case, I am pressing Don’t send.

On the following Welcome screen of the Android Studio Setup Wizard, you just need to click Next.

The next window asks you for the Installation Type. There you can just select Standard and start the final installation of all necessary things for your Android development environment with a click on Next.

On the following screen, you see a short overview of the things that get installed. If you want to change your installation type you can do that by pressing previous. If you want to continue with the installation click on Next.

After pressing Next the installation of all required components for your Android development environment will start. After finishing you can click Finish to get to the next page.

On this page, you just have to agree to the licenses of your downloaded components. You have to accept each license separately by clicking on it in the left column and selecting Accept in the bottom right corner. After accepting all, you can click Finish.

Now you will see the starting screen of Android Studio your new Android development environment. If you are using already IntelliJ IDEA you will recognize this page already.

If you have any questions regarding the setup process or the installation feel free to reach out to me via the comments or the contact form!

Integrated Development Environment – IDE

To start programming, you need to install what is known as an IDE, short for Integrated Development Environment. This handy tool allows you to write, compile and debug code – all in one place. It’s like a programming helper and offers features such as syntax highlighting and code completion to make your programming easier.
Whether you are a beginner or an experienced developer, an IDE is an essential companion in your programming adventures.

Downloading IntelliJ IDEA

To set up a powerful Java development environment we use IntelliJ IDEA. IntelliJ is the leading Java IDE on the market. It is extremely feature-rich, has many plugins that can be very helpful for development, has great community support because of its popularity and has also a sleek design. Moreover, IntelliJ does not just provide all this for Java but also supports many other languages and provides language-specific features.

Before you can begin to set up a powerful Java development environment with IntelliJ IDEA, you first have to download the setup. To get that you just have to visit the JetBrains Download Website. There you can download two different versions. The Ultimate Edition and the Community Edition. The key difference between these two is, that the Ultimate Version is paid, whilst the Community Version is free. For the beginning, the free version is enough, however, the paid version has some nice features like creating a Spring project directly in your IDE and many other helpful features.

Good to know is that if you are a student or teacher you can apply for an educational license. With that, you get IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and their other Premium products for free. If you are interested you can click here.

In this tutorial, we are covering the installation of the Community Edition, but the process is quite similar to the Ultimate Edition.
To download the setup you have to visit the website, which is mentioned already above. To download the Community Edition setup, you may have to scroll a bit to see the download link since the first link on this Website is for the Ultimate Edition. You can also select your operating system at the top of the page.

Set up a powerful Java Development Environment

After the download is finished you can execute the setup. Now the process to set up a powerful Java development environment begins. On the welcome page of the IntelliJ IDEA installer, you can just press Next.

The following slide will ask you, to to select the installation folder. There you can choose any location you want. As usual, it is recommended to install such programs if possible on an SSD to improve the speed of the program. Keep also an eye on the required space in the bottom left corner and the space left on the directory you selected. Confirm your choice by pressing Next.

After pressing Next, you should see the Installation Options window. If you want to create a Desktop Shortcut you can check the checkbox. We recommend to select the checkboxes as shown in the screenshot below. Especially the option “Add ‘Open Folder as Project'” to the context menu is quite handy because you can open every folder on your computer as a project. With that, you can also open existing projects, that are not recognized as projects. But also the associations are helpful to open your programming files in IntelliJ by default. If you have set all checks you can press Next.

On the next screen, you can select your preferred start menu folder. You can choose whatever folder you like, but you can also just leave the preentered folder name, so a new start menu folder will be created. If you are done with that you can press Install to start the installation. If you want to go back a step to change a setting or cancel the setup you can still do this.

After the installation is done, you will see the last window of the setup. There you can select “Run IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition” to start the program after finishing the setup. To complete the setup simply press Finish.

You now have successfully set up a powerful Java development environment. If you now start IntelliJ you will first see a screen to agree to their Terms. To continue you have to confirm that you read and accept them and confirm that by pressing Continue.

The next window now shows you options to create a new project or open one. You will see this screen every time you open IntelliJ IDEA when no project is loaded. If you have a project opened and you close IntelliJ, it will automatically reload the project when restarting your new IDE.