Introduction

To develop apps for Android devices, you use a set of tools that are included in the Android SDK. Once you've downloaded and installed the SDK, you can access these tools right from your Eclipse IDE, through the ADT plugin, or from the command line. Developing with Eclipse is the preferred method because it can directly invoke the tools that you need while developing applications.
However, you may choose to develop with another IDE or a simple text editor and invoke the tools on the command line or with scripts. This is a less streamlined way to develop because you will sometimes have to call command line tools manually, but you will have access to the same number of features that you would have in Eclipse.

Figure: The development process for Android applications.

The basic steps for developing applications (with or without Eclipse) are shown in figure 1. The development steps encompass four development phases, which include:

Setup 

During this phase you install and set up your development environment. You also create Android Virtual Devices (AVDs) and connect hardware devices on which you can install your applications

Development
During this phase you set up and develop your Android project, which contains all of the source code and resource files for your application.

Debugging and Testing

During this phase you build your project into a debuggable .apk package that you can install and run on the emulator or an Android-powered device. If you are using Eclipse, builds are generated each time you project is saved. If you're using another IDE, you can build your project using Ant and install it on a device using adb.

Next, you debug your application using a JDWP-compliant debugger along with the debugging and logging .Last, you test your application using various Android SDK testing tools.

Publishing

During this phase you configure and build your application for release and distribute your application to users.