Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2022 May 30

= May 30 =

Transferring android studio to D: drive
I have recently installed android studio in my C: drive. But now I realise it is taking too much space. I do have much free space in D and E drives, So how can I transfer everything to D:, so nothing breaks. I (stupidly) tried cutting .android folder and pasting it to D: but doing so, android studio is just recreating folder in C: so I undid that cut paste. -- 2409:4043:60A:E33D:9426:B9CA:2907:84B5 (talk) 17:15, 30 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Looks like people ask this question a lot, all over the web. So far I have found (sticking to Stack Overflow as reasonably trustworthy):
 * Within Android Studio, set the new location under Settings->Appearance and Behaviour->System Settings->Android SDK
 * Or, open the local.properties file, and set this: sdk.dir=your_path_here (I assume this does the same thing as changing the setting)
 * Other answers, though, mention the ANDROID_SDK_HOME environment variable as the thing to change.
 * If I may ask (for my own benefit), what are the specs of your machine in terms of memory, drive space and drive type (SSD), and processor cores, and does Android Studio run OK? I wanted to install it myself but it seems to be a resource-demanding behemoth (presumably because it intends to do things like simulate a phone, which I wouldn't even want it to do). People claim that it runs so much better with absurd amounts of free memory, a huge solid state drive and multiple cores, but since I'd only want to make crappy little apps with it I get the impression that this is pretentiousness: and even the stated minimum spec is kind of excessive-sounding, so I'd like to know what the reality is. Card Zero  (talk) 18:00, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you for answer. The first link worked for me and it cleared up 8 GB storage. But can someone please explain what's meaning and how to do thing written in 3rd answer of first link as it will help me to clear more space. As of my laptop, It has 512 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM, 4 cpu cores which I think are of 2.1 GHz. The Android studio runs OK, but it takes up around 40% RAM all the time it runs so I can't do anything else at that time. Also It takes 40% CPU while starting and while starting simulation. I am a student, and I made my first app which is too small so I can't say how much usage will increase on making big apps. For now it takes around 30 GB storage, but out of it 14 GB is for simulator. I don't understand if you are not going to simulate then what you do? connect it directly to real phone to test? -- 2409:4043:610:9E5C:D1B:4491:DEE7:5A9C (talk) 14:20, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, exactly that, test it on the phone. Thank you for the reference information!
 * The third answer there is talking about a symbolic link. Here's Microsoft's reference on the mklink command. (If you're on Linux I'll have to find something else.) The person is using /d to create a link to a directory. However, the actual link (W10.1_WXGA_Tablet_API_28.avd) and the target (d:\androidSimulators\W10.1_WXGA_Tablet_API_28.avd) look like files, since they end in .avd, so I'm not sure if that's right.
 * I gather from here that those .avd things are actually directories despite having a file extension.
 * In trying to find out about this, I bumped into a different Stack Overflow question about Android environment variables. It seems there are several (which you can create), and there's a link to a list of them. Card Zero  (talk) 15:41, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you. That symbolic link is amazing thing for storage problems. -- 2409:4043:209E:116:F805:685:A854:B8F1 (talk) 04:53, 3 June 2022 (UTC)