Name: How to Make an Android App for Beginners
Uploaded: 2025-05-22T07:49:48.000Z
Duration: 19 min 18 s
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Android development can be a great way to turn your idea into reality or start a promising career as an app developer, and getting started is probably easier than you think.

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These days, Android development is done with a tool called Android Studio.

Android Studio is kind of like the Microsoft word for writing Android apps.

It helps organize our projects and gives us a user-friendly way to create what we're looking for.

In this video, we'll walk through installing Android Studio and then make an app.

Don't worry if you don't have any experience with Android or even programming in general.

As long as you follow along, we'll all end up at the same place.

Now we'll download Android Studio in just a second, but first, let's look at what we'll be making.

These days, there are too many choices of everything.

So to help us choose between a bunch of options, we'll make an app that lets us specify how many options there are and then selects one at random when we click a button.

Now that we know where we'd like to end up, let's start by downloading Android Studio.

Click the link below to go to the Android developer website, and then click the download button.

Accept the terms and conditions, and then download Android Studio.

Once it's downloaded, follow these steps to install Android Studio.

Drag it into the Applications folder, and then launch Android Studio.

Since you won't have any previous settings, you can choose Do Not Import Settings.

Then click OK to complete the installation.

And now we're presented with the Android Studio setup wizard.

On this first screen, we can just click Next.

For the install type, let's pick Custom, and then click Next.

And then, when we're selecting our SDK components, I already have the Android SDK installed on my computer, but you'll want to make sure this is checked, as well as the Intel Haxm performance box, and since I'll be running this on a virtual device, we'll want to include an Android virtual device as well.

This is just a version of Android that runs on our computer.

If you have your own Android device, you don't need to include this, but it's recommended if you're going to continue doing Android development.

Then let's click Next, and we can accept the recommended choice here, and click Next again, and then Finish.

Once you've downloaded all the components, you might need to type in your password to allow it to install Haxm.

Then let's click Finish, and now that we're running Android Studio, let's pick Start a new Android Studio project to get started.

First we'll need to specify our application name.

Then for the company domain, you would put the web address of your company.

So for me, this will be teamtreehouse.com, though really, as long as you're not publishing the app to the Play Store, this can be whatever you want.

Lastly, Android used to be written entirely in Java, but recently we've been given the freedom to use Kotlin, which I think is a big improvement over Java.

Let's check the Include Kotlin Support box, and then click Next to continue.

Now I know you're probably ready to get started, but before we get on with the app, let's take a minute to talk about how an Android app comes together.

The first piece of an app is the layout, which describes how the app should look.

In Android, layouts are created by combining different types of views.

At its most basic, a view is just a rectangular area on the screen, but there are views that contain text, views that act as buttons, and even views for holding other views.

And by combining all these different types of views, we can make pretty much anything.

The other piece of an app is the activity.

You can think of the activity as the code behind a layout.

It's where you tell your buttons what to do.

Getting back to the code, it looks like we're looking at our activity.

It also looks like we've got an error, and it's suggesting a solution.

So I'll click that, accept the agreement, and click Next.

Now, I'll take a second to just make my screen a little easier to see.

Okay, so Android apps have two parts, the layout and the activity.

And right now, we're inside the activity.

And if we look inside this onCreate function, we can see a line that says setContentView r.layout.activity.main.

This is where our layout gets connected to our activity.

As you might have guessed, this makes activity.main.xml our layout.

Let's click on it and see what we've got.

And I'll click right here to hide this side section.

We can bring it back by clicking the Project pane.

On this screen, we can create our layout by dragging and dropping views.

We can also delete views by selecting them and then hitting Backspace.

Let's get rid of this Hello World text view and then start adding some views of our own.

So if we drag out a button, we'll get a button.

Now one thing to call out is that we're putting these views inside of another view called a constraint layout.

What's cool about a constraint layout is that it lets us position the views inside by using constraints, which let us chain views together and makes creating a layout super simple.

Let's try using constraints with our button to make it look like it does in the mockups.

To align it to the bottom, start by selecting the button, then click on the bottom white circle and drag it to the bottom of the screen to make the connection.

Notice that it doesn't quite make it to the bottom.

This is because our constraint contains an 8-pixel buffer.

You can see the details about a view's constraints up here on the right.

And if you want to change the buffer, you can type in the box or select a value.

To center something in a constraint layout, you just constrain it to both the left and right sides.

So let's drag the left side to the left and the right side to the right.

Also, you may have noticed that we have two screens here.

The left one is showing us what the app will look like.

And the right one is more of a blueprint view, showing us all the little details behind the app.

You can toggle between showing the design, just the blueprint, or both by using this button up here.

So just to make things a little easier to see, for this screencast, I'll be using the design view.

But keep in mind, if you want to see the blueprint view, it's always there.

Now to make our button, say, roll, we just need to update the text attribute over here on the right.

And let me make this just a little wider so it's easier to read.

The last thing we need to do with our button is make it wider.

To change the width of a view, you just update the layout width attribute.

Let's make it take up the full width of its constraints by changing this to match constraint.

Then, to make this match the mockups, let's change the buffer for both the left and right constraints to 96.

Now that we've got our button, let's add our selector.

In Android, that type of view is called a seek bar.

To find it, click on widgets and then drag out a seek bar to screen.

Then let's constrain the bottom of the seek bar to the top of our button and the sides to the sides of the screen.

Let's also update the buffers for those constraints to be 32 for the sides and 24 for the bottom.

Finally, let's change the layout width to match constraint and we're good to go.

The next piece we need is a text view that says how many.

Let's click on the text tab and drag out a text view.

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How to Make an Android App for Beginners

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