Add android platform in Ionic 2

When I used the Ionic CLI to create the Dogwalk project it came with an iOS project. Now it’s time to add the Android platform.

These are the steps i took to install the Android SDK and add the Android Platform. I ran into errors, maybe you’ll get them as well, so even though this was not a smooth install maybe it helps!

Ionic add platform Android

To add the android platform to your app you run the following command in a terminal:

ionic platform add android

Since I already had the Android SDK installed from when building another project I figured I could run it directly. But i got this error:

Error: Failed to find 'ANDROID_HOME' environment variable. Try setting setting it manually.
Failed to find 'android' command in your 'PATH'. Try update your 'PATH' to include path to valid SDK directory.

The solution according to stack overflow was to do this:

export ANDROID_HOME=/<installation location>/android-sdk-macosx
export PATH=${PATH}:$ANDROID_HOME/tools:$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools

But that didn’t work. So I installed Android Studio.

Android Studio

After installing Android Studio I got a few questions to update and install SDK-components I didn’t have. I accepted them all.

After that i opened the platforms/android project in android studio and tried to run it in a Simulator. And in this step Android Studio wanted to install a simulator. So it did install the Android_Accelerated_X86. If you choose the other one it will be slow and not be able to start the ionic app. At least I got the error message that it couldnt find the folder android_asset.

Android Studio run app

But the simulator couldn’t open the app. At this point I figured I should delete the ionic android project and add it again. So close Android studio.

Delete an Ionic platform

To remove a platform run this command in a terminal:

ionic platform rm android

The next step was to make sure i’ve got the latest Ionic and Cordova version.

Updating Ionic and Cordova

Run this terminal in a terminal:

npm update -g ionic cordova

Adding and building Android platform again

Once again run some commands in the terminal:

ionic platform add android
ionic build android

No errors this time. Awesome!

So lets run the app in the emulator:

ionic build android

And this time it was successful!

Ionic 2 dogwalk android simulator