I hope you find this helpful, this is what I used as a basis to get me started - step-by-step guide on getting started with the Android SDK without installing Studio If you don't want to use the coREPO_OS_OVERRIDEmmand line for building/emulating, there are extensions for VSCode that take care of the integration, just so long as you have installed the command line tools and configured your $PATH, downloaded the emulator, etc. I did not need to install Android Studio, just the command line tools. I recently had some development work on an Android app, and was able to continue using my VSCode. (Not that I'm saying Android Studio is bad, mind, just unnecessary for me - but at least it's not Xcode! Don't get me started on Apples evil empire and their ridiculous restrictive rules trying to force developers to use a mac)

With diskspace being something of a premium, I don't like to install bloated IDEs just to compile for my target platform. My IDE of choice is currently VSCode, whilst my development machine is an aging laptop running a Linux distro. I am a cross-platform developer with previous experience developing for Android.

Visual studio code android app