I’m wondering if people have any suggestions for improving the Android SDK installation experience.
The instructions on our Wiki (Mac and Linux) currently recommend installing Android Studio. The idea behind this was that Android Studio offers a nice setup wizard on first launch that installs the required Android SDK packages for you and sets up a default virtual device. Unfortunately, Android Studio only does this for the most recent SDK (API 23), while Cordova currently requires API 22. So there is still some manual setup needed and the instructions have grown out of date with recent updates to Android Studio (I also think the UI is rather confusing and documentation is lacking).
An alternative would be to have people install the stand-alone SDK tools, install packages, and create a virtual device manually. I’m not happy with this, but the steps would at least be transparent and that might make it easier to diagnose problems. But I’m afraid it would make things too hard for less experienced developers.
What do people doing Android development think about this? How was the installation experience for you? How could we improve or at least better document it?