Understanding the Gradle System

Google introduced Gradle and Android Studio in order to help make the development process more streamlined. They wanted to ensure that it becomes easier for developers to reuse code and also help them create build variants with ease. Having it closely integrated with an IDE such as Android Studio ensured that Gradle has a good IDE integration without making the build system dependent on the IDE.

In this chapter, we will discuss:

• Setting up Gradle in Android Studio
• Dependent libraries to be used in Android Studio, including Identifiers

If you have been using Eclipse, it's likely that some of you won't know of any alternative to the default APK generation technique within the IDE. But, as such as alternative, you can do this using the command line. The Android build system compiles app resources and source code, and packages them into APKs that you can test, deploy, sign, and distribute.