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I need to start android-development to develop an app for a motorola smartwatch on my good old mac OS X lion. Therefore I tried installing android studio when I got to the point where everything goes wrong and that's where I realised that mac OS X 1.8 was required.

After looking for workarounds (I am pretty sure there must be some as I found people claiming having android studio running on a not-requirement-meeting OS) I stumbled upon a question on SO. Although the answer there suggested to forget about android studio, I tried again and I discovered that you could install android studio without AVD. This turned out better than expected and after replacing the ADB with an older (mac os x 10.7.5 compiled) version, I finally managed to start a new project.

Although everything seems to work now, gradle hangs when I try to build a random project with blank activity. As I don't find much information about gradle, its system requirements and I don't have any experience with it, I was wondering whether someone would know a solution.

Which leads to my actual question: Is there a workaround to get android studio running on an older mac OS X? For instance by solving the gradle-problem or maybe some totally other technique or am I doomed to use eclipse (assuming I am not dual-booting)?

Any help is welcome!

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Mr Tsjolder from codidact
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1 Answers1

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It is actually possible. You can download any version of android studio (I guess, didn't try). After I found someone that could explain me how gradle works, I managed to get 1.4 working on my 'old' mac.

You just have to take the following points into account

  1. Make sure you don't install any AVD-part as this only works as from mac OS X 10.8. For me this meant performing a custom installation and deselect ADV. I also deselected the other intel software, but I don't know whether this is necessary.
  2. Replace your platform-tools folder (which is simply in your android sdk folder e.g. /Users/YourName/Library/Android/sdk) with an older version that I downloaded from https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/platform-tools_r19.0.1-macosx.zip. If necessary your tools folder can also be downgraded to https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r22.6.2-macosx.zip
  3. If you've done this, you can normally already work with android studio and create your own project, but then gradle starts to freak out because the build-tools don't work (again this can be found in your android sdk folder). I had two folders in the build-tools directory: 19.1.0 and 23.0.1. Because the build-tools in 23.0.1 don't work for mac OS X 10.7, you can actually just delete that folder or get any other folder for the version you like, but you need to tell gradle. To do this, you can follow the options listed in the answers on this question.

I hope this helps all people who ever want to get started with Android Studio on an older version of mac OS X

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