Android SDK

SDK, abbreviated from Software Development Kit, is a set of development tools for Android.

It is usually comprised of

sample projects with source code,
an emulator,
APIs (application program interfaces),
required libraries
development tools to build, test and debug apps.

It supports Linux, Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later, Windows XP or later. In a nutshell, Android SDK enables developers to create applications for the Android platform. As you know that the Android SDK is consisted of multiple packages that you can separately download. When a new version of Android platform is released or SDK tools are updated, SDK Manager can be used to download them to your environment.

A corresponding SDK is also released when Google releases a new version of Android. So developers have to download every version of SDK for the particular device to be able to build, test and debug programs.

Using an integrated development environment (IDE) is the common method, although SDK can be used to write Android programs in the command prompt. Speaking of IDE, the recommended one is Eclipse with Android Development Tools (ADT) plug-in. There are also other ones, namely NetBeans or IntelliJ that will also work. Since Android applications are written in JAVA code, so the Java Development Kit (JDK) is also required.