Windows Set Up is a bit of a mess

nativescriptcore
android
#1

Hi guys,

I’m giving a workshop in a couple of weeks and tried to create a simple installation guide for setting Nativescript + Android emulator for Windows

When you run the nativescript installer https://docs.nativescript.org/start/quick-setup it installs the Android SDK - however it doesn’t create any AVDs nor tells you have to create them.

In fact the recommendation seems to be to use the Android Studio to do that - it’s a lot easier to manage the AVDs from there, but the studio comes with its own copy of the SDK and usually leads to problems to to ENV variables that were set in the {N} conflicting with the Studio.

You can tell Android Studio where to manage the SDK, but it did not go smoothly for me (tried 2 clean installs).

Am I missing something here or is this really that difficult to get started?

#2

My recommendation would be to never touch the automatic install and only use android studio.
It’s the official android way, you can select the needed sdk yourself and won’t have problems in the future as Android Studio will always be ahead of the cli.
It takes a few minutes to install Android studio, select a sdk and maybe set ANDROID_HOME.
NS does not need anything special, I got it running without any NS specific configuration.
Honestly if people won’t even bother learning the bare minimum of the platform they want to develop for, they could go back to ionic.

#3

Honestly if people won’t even bother learning the bare minimum of the platform they want to develop for, they could go back to ionic.

I think that’s a bit harsh - especially since Ionic users need the exact same set of tools.

I do think that if {N} provides a set up tool it needs to be up to date and actually take you through the entire process, otherwise it can just make the installation process harder for new users.

Regardless I’ll try dropping their installation and doing it purely with Android Studio - thanks

#4

I actually never touched anything platform specific with ionic. I used phonegap build, community plugins and the cli. No need for any simulator or building the app yourself.

The problem with NativeScript: the cli is horrible. It is slow. It is a buggy mess. The same bugs that existed 3 years ago still exist. The same missing features are still missing and have to be set up manually (or with more plugins); e.g. resource generation, webpack, uglify, aot etc.
All of that is provided by ionic and react native out of the box.
For that reason I wouldn’t trust the cli to provide an up to date install tool any time soon (ever).

#5

The fact that no one is rushing to defend the CLI / help with my question kinda backs everything your saying :frowning: its kinda sad really