Is GUI for Android SDK manager gone?

101
votes

I rarely do something for Android so I'm a bit confused. While back there were two type of installations - Android Studio and just Android SDK. I have IDEA so I don't need Studio. Typically I download SDK that have UI tool to download its components.

I just got https://dl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r25.2.3-linux.zip and I can't see UI SDK Manager in it. There is bin/sdkmanager shell script. But it's kinda inconvenient for my purpose because going through output of --list, copy-pasting packages names and running sdkmanager would take too much time.

What's the way of installing this quickly now ?

PS. I'm on Ubuntu 16.10 in case it matters.

PS2. I just tried sdkmanager "platforms;android-25" as per documentation but it gave no output after me agreeing to terms. Where did it install SDK files? Did it even install it? Amazing.

11
androidandroid-sdk-toolsandroid-sdk-manager
Try Android > SDK Manager > Launch Standalone SDK Manager. – Enzokie
It's not a real solution but what I can say is that on Windows I have a SDK Manager.exe in the root of the android-sdk directory. If that helps (probably not). In case you are right, did you try to download a less recent version? – Beppi's
@Enzokie I guess it's something in Android Studio ? I have standard IDEA with Android plugin thus there is no such menu option. Or at least I don't see it :) – expert
With android sdk v26 the GUI is completely gone. It is only accessible from android studio. Too bad Google aggressively promoting android studio. – Bharat G
Alternative SDK manager is available here: stackoverflow.com/a/44244605/971547 – Erel

11 Answers

63
votes

Looks like I'm not the only one who had to deal with this idiocy. The way to install it

  1. Unpack zip to some /parent folder so it has /parent/tools. I extracted content of zip's tools to /androidsdk and it was mistake. Script couldn't find it.
  2. Set ANDROID_HOME to /parent folder.
  3. Run /parent/tools/android sdk to see SDK Manager's GUI.

Google, was it hard to leave script that does the above in installation zip so people don't need to waste 40 minutes googling around ?

54
votes

Officially GUI is gone, but pleasant people saved the last of it for us: installer_r24.4.1-windows.exe

According for this announcment Google doesn't intend to support ADT pluging for Eclipse since June 2015, and so as GUI for ADT at all. They explain the decision with an entire switching to Android Studio. There are no links on official Android sources where to download last GUI version, because they find it as having potential security bugs.

So you have chance to download the last saved version, till the link will not be changed. If it already happened try to search by tag.

Thank to Losin' Me for links:

Found on web.archive.org

25
votes

Late to the party, but you can download v24.4 installer like the good old day here. It will update itself to v25.x and everything works as expected. Also a big ef'u Google.

Update 2021-07 : This tool does not offer build tools version >= 30 and won't show newer packages anymore

10
votes

Since Android released build tools 25.3.0, they removed android CLI command and replaced it with avdmanager and sdkmanager located inside your $ANDROID_HOME/bin/tools

Run this command to get a list of available packages in sdk-style path: sdkmanager --list

Run this command to install a specific image: sdkmanager --verbose "system-images;android-19;google_apis;x86"

8
votes

From the command line, just type

tools/android sdk

and the usual GUI for the Android SDK will be prompted.

Hope this helps

4
votes

If You have Android Studio, you can point your sdk manager in Android Studio to where you just installed your SDK. You can manage it from there. That's what I had to do. The command line was so tough for me as I didn't get the full package names when running sdkmanager --list command

2
votes

Here is the link for download android sdk with GUI for windows, linux and mac:

Uncompressing and put the folder named tools inside androidsdk directory, search for android.bat: it's open GUI in windows.

Download packages and develop apps.

2
votes

For using with Xamarin, The official Xamarin SDK Manager is now available for Visual Studio 2017 and above. It can be installed from under "Cross Platform Mobile" workload in the Visual Studio Installer. It replaces Google's standalone SDK Manager (which was deprecated in version 25.2.3 of the Android SDK Tools package).

1
votes

In the tools directory search for ' android.bat ' file and run it , GUI for SDK manager will open .

1
votes

I am sorry for bumping a necropost. But I have just released a simple Android SDK GUI. Maybe this little weekend project could save some people from headache of using sdkmanager command line or downloading android-tools twice.

You could check my project at AndroidGUI.

Fork as you please or better yet send me PR. Any help would be very much appreciated.

PS: It would be very useful if somebody could point me to the latest sdklib-*.jar source code. So that I could interface with Android SDK directly.

0
votes

For all Windows users: I just made a "porting" of the old GUI executables...

although porting is a big word, I just changed the executable so it would read andoid_gui.bat instead of android.bat, and added that file and some required libs (although I think only archquery.jar is needed, I also put sdkmanager.jar, sdkstats.jar and sdkuilib.jar; it seems to work even without them so let me know if they are not needed)

Just extract it in the SDK directory

Download here