Developing/Installing apps on Android Atrix

March 15 2011 by B-Drive in Uncategorized |No Comments

I just bought an Atrix from my carrier, AT&T.  It’s a groundbreaking device: dual core processor, 1 gig ram, HDMI port.  The battery life is stupendous.

Anyway, first day I made a simple app from a sample I found.  You can use either Eclipse, or NetBeans to make an Android app.

Here’s the developer setup for making an Android app for Android 2.2 (Froyo I think):

  • Unzip the Android developer toolkit on your machine.  Start up the “android” executable in /tools.  Then, from that, you can install the needed Android SDK and Android SDK Tools for your version of the OS.  For me that was android-8 sdk and revision 10 of the tools.  Install the samples for your version too.
  • Create a virtual device based on that from the Android GUI.  No advise on that.
  • Install an Android plugin into your IDE.  Both Eclipse and NetBeans have them.  Sorry no links but they are easy enough to find.
  • Create an app, run in the emulator from your IDE via the plugin.  Very cool.

I made a small RssReader app  (thanks to automateddeveloper.blogspot.com) and loaded it here:  https://bitbucket.org/ivystreet/project/src.  This project is an Eclipse project, but I will be making a NetBeans project soon for another company I know as a marketing treat for them; hopefully its a bit better.

At first I had a little problem loading the app (bundled into an .apk) onto my Atrix using adb.  “adb” is the android app manager over a USB cable, command line utility.  But actually, the solution to load apps on an Atrix via USB was simple:

  1. Go to Settings–>Applications–>Development and turn on “USB Debugging.”
  2. Plug in your Atrix via USB cable.
  3. Go to Top Menu Pulldown–>USB Connection and select “USB Mass Storage.”
  4. In a terminal type <your path to>/adb devices.  You will see your Atrix listed.
  5. In the terminal type <your path to>/adb install (path/name of app).apk.

That’s it, you have installed your application.

Some sites want to call this “side-loading” or “hacking.”  I kind of think the word “hacking” is something the newer dynamic language developers use in a different context than a seasoned Java developer like myself, and those terms don’t imply doing something you shouldn’t be doing anymore so don’t let them scare you.  Using adb is a perfectly fine method to load apps and absolutely necessary for an Android  developer.

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