First of all, android create project no longer works.

In fact, tools/android has been removed in SDK Tools 25.3.0:

*************************************************************************
The "android" command is deprecated.
For manual SDK, AVD, and project management, please use Android Studio.
For command-line tools, use tools/bin/sdkmanager and tools/bin/avdmanager
*************************************************************************

Some of its functionalities have been moved to tools/bin/sdkmanager and tools/bin/avdmanager as stated above. However, other functionalities are effectively lost.

RIP: android create project.

So let’s see what’s still remaining.

It’s amazing that they still keep command line tools as a separate download. I bet this separate download will also be removed in at most a few years. But for now the document says you can use the downloaded sdkmanager to further download other SDK packages. So let’s try this.

Running sdkmanager --list gives a list of packages to download. You no longer have the auto-selection provided by the old android tool. So you have to figure out which packages to install by yourself. If you have good memory, you know these packages are frequently used:

build-tools;27.0.1
platform-tools
platforms;android-27
system-images;android-27;google_apis;x86
tools

Running sdkmanager --help and you will find a --package_file option. That looks good because it saves you typing package names in each run of the command. So put those packages in a text file packages.txt and run sdkmanager with this option:

sdkmanager --package_file=packages.txt

Wait a moment and the packages are downloaded. Not bad.

However, now, if you run the same command again, it will fail. Something just bit you, right? Yes it’s either a bug (1, 2) or a feature.

You may also want to run this command to accept licenses so they won’t block you from other operations:

sdkmanager --licenses

Now you have familiar stuff back there in a usable state. Congratulations! Next, you may want to write a simple app and run it on the emulator. Now that you understand android create project doesn’t exist any more. But let’s say you somehow get the project ready and successfully build it with gradle. Then you only have to run it on an emulator. Since an emulator requires an AVD, you have to create an AVD first.

Creating an AVD named test can be done with:

avdmanager -n test -k system-images;android-27;google_apis;x86

Now run emulator with this AVD:

emulator @test

Oops…You saw it crash and you knew you just bit yourself again. Let’s fix this:

cd $ANDROID_HOME/emulator/lib64
mv libstdc++ libstdc++.bak
mkdir libstdc++

Now the emulator will be using libs on your system instead of the buggy libs shipped with the Android download. Running emulator again and you will be able to see the power-up screen.

After so much exercise, you finally get something working. Congratulations.

Download historical versions of Android SDK

As mentioned at the beginning, android was removed in SDK Tools 25.3.0. According to SDK Tools Release Notes, the version right before 25.3.0 is 25.2.5. So we download this version.

Actually, historical versions of SDK tools are still available from the server:

https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r[revision]-windows.zip
https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r[revision]-linux.zip
https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r[revision]-macosx.zip

Simply replace [revision] with the revision number. For example, we are going to download SDK Tools Revision 25.2.5 for Linux at:

https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r25.2.5-linux.zip

Yes, it’s there.

After downloading this zip file, unzip it and run tools/android. You will be able to see the familiar package selection window. This is really not bad.

Write an app with historical versions of Android SDK

When you start writing an app, you realise things are actually trickier. The SDK Tools revision is not everything. You still need to find compatible versions of platforms and build tools. Well, you don’t seem to be able to select version of platform tools. Plus, if you use Eclipse+ADT, then things get even more complicated.

To make things simpler, we just use the latest version of ADT by adding this URL in Eclipse:

https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/

When we are using SDK Tools Revision 25.2.5, ADT is not happy with the latest version of build tools (27.0.1). So we revert to an older version of build tools (25.0.2). With environment variables properly set, this combination seems to work:

Android SDK Tools == 25.2.5
Android SDK Platform-tools == 26.0.2
Android SDK Build-tools == 25.0.2
SDK Platform == 19
Android Support Repository == 47

So finally I successfully made a HelloWorld app with historical versions of Android SDK.