Book Image

Android Studio 2 Essentials - Second Edition

By : Belén Cruz Zapata
Book Image

Android Studio 2 Essentials - Second Edition

By: Belén Cruz Zapata

Overview of this book

Android Studio 2, the official IDE for Android application development, dramatically improves your workflow by letting you quickly see changes running on your device or emulator. It gives developers a unique platform by making app builds and deployment faster. This book will get you up and running with all the essential features of Android Studio 2 to optimize your development workflow. Starting off with the basic installation and configuration of Android Studio 2, this book will help you build a new project by showing you how to create a custom launcher icon and guiding you to choose your project. You will then gain an insight into the additional tools provided in Android Studio, namely the Software Development Kit (SDK) Manager, Android Virtual Device (AVD) Manager, and Javadoc. You’ll also see how to integrate Google Play Services in an Android project. Finally, you’ll become familiar with the Help section in Android Studio, which will enable you to search for support you might require in different scenarios.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android Studio 2 Essentials Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Adding Google Play services to Android Studio


The first thing we need to know is what we need to add to our Android Studio. You just learned that the APK is available in the Google Play store and it is the actual runtime of the services. We, as developers, only need this package in our testing device while debugging our application. What we need to add to Android Studio is the Google Play services client library.

This library has to be declared as a dependency to your application, so perform the following steps:

  1. Open the build.gradle file for your application module (/app/build.gradle).

  2. Add a new dependency to the build of your app by typing the following line inside the dependencies block:

    dependencies {
       …
       compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:8.4.0'
    }

    The latest Google Play Services version is 8.4 (December 2015). When new updates of the library are published, you will need to update the version number in the build.gradle file.

  3. Navigate to Tools | Android | Sync Project with Gradle...