When developing Android apps, I’m almost always working in the Android Studio development environment (IDE).
I have a pretty solid dev computer, but even so, it just takes a little while for Android Studio to start up. There are times when I have to make a teeny tiny change to the source code, and it’s just a chore to open the IDE, change the code, and rebuild my app.
For example, suppose my client has requested a change to a string that’s displayed in a TextView. I’d much rather open my strings.xml file using a text editor like vi, edit the string as requested, and rebuild the app without ever touching Studio.
In fact, it’s possible to do this. Open a terminal, and go to your Android Studio project root. For me, this is in my home directory under ~/StudioProjects/. After editing the strings file (e.g. ./app/src/main/res/values/strings.xml), run ./gradlew build. You’ll see a bunch of output like this:
./gradlew build
:buildSrc:compileJava UP-TO-DATE
:buildSrc:compileGroovy UP-TO-DATE
...
:app:test UP-TO-DATE
:app:check
:app:build
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 4.855 secs
Your new apk will be in the default location for your project. If you don’t recall where that is, you can find it quickly by running find . -name "*.apk".
Note: this demo was done using Ubuntu 16.04 OS with Android Studio 2.3. I’m not sure if it will work for Android Studio 3, but I think it will.