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Android

Posted by Patrick Morris
Patrick Morris
12,084 Points

installing SDK build tools before API 17 in Android Studio

When using Eclipse, I preferred to use my physical phone to test the apps. In the switch to Android Studio, I've been happy with everything except that my phone no longer works as an emulator.

Attempting to run the app through my phone returns the following error in Android Studio: Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_OLDER_SDK]

Okay, so Android Studio just needs the phone's older SDK installed, no problem. My phone runs Ice Cream Sandwich (4.04, API 15), by the way.

But here's the issue: the build tools in Android Studio's SDK only go back as far as API 17, so installing 15 from there isn't an option (the API is there, the build tools aren't). I've tried to grab the older build tools from the command line, by cd-ing to my tools directory in the SDK and then querying like so...

./android update sdk -u -a -t build-tools-15.0.0

but after checking with a dozen https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/ repositories, it spits back:

Warning: The package filter removed all packages. There is nothing to install. Please consider trying to update again without a package filter.

The minimum sdk targets in both my androidmanifest and my gradle are 14, so that shouldn't be a problem.

So, are pre-API 17 devices compatible with Android Studio, or am I tied to Eclipse for now? Is there a trick to getting these 'obsolete' build tools from Android that I haven't figured out?

Thanks for any help with this!