Google ships the Android SDK two ways. Android Studio 234 (current stable: Quail 4, 2026.1.4 Patch 1, a 1.5 GB download) is the full IDE, whose SDK Manager and Device Manager wrap the command-line tools in dialogs. The command-line tools package (build 15859902) holds just sdkmanager, avdmanager and friends, for servers, CI and headless machines. Cordova 129 needs only the SDK, but the IDE is handy for opening platforms/android and debugging native code. On a desktop, choose Android Studio; the emulator then accelerates with the Windows Hypervisor Platform, macOS's Hypervisor.Framework or Linux's KVM.
On Windows and macOS, run the installer from developer.android.com/studio (https://developer.android.com/studio 234 ) and let the setup wizard install the SDK to its default location (C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk on Windows, ~/Library/Android/sdk on macOS). Then open Tools > SDK Manager, switch to the SDK Tools tab, and make sure Android SDK Command-line Tools (latest) is ticked, because Cordova calls avdmanager from that package.
This book took the WSL2 6 route, so every build could be scripted. wsl --install -d Ubuntu-26.04 in an administrator PowerShell 55,538 installs the distribution; WSL2 enables nested virtualization by default on Windows 11, so /dev/kvm exists inside Ubuntu 225 for any user in the kvm group. The command-line tools go into a fixed layout, because sdkmanager derives the SDK root from its own location:
sudo apt install openjdk-17-jdk-headless unzip wget
sudo usermod -aG kvm "$USER"
wget https://dl.google.com/android/repository/commandlinetools-linux-15859902_latest.zip
sudo mkdir -p /opt/android-sdk/cmdline-tools
sudo unzip -q commandlinetools-linux-15859902_latest.zip -d /opt/android-sdk/cmdline-tools
sudo mv /opt/android-sdk/cmdline-tools/cmdline-tools /opt/android-sdk/cmdline-tools/latest
sudo chown -R "$USER" /opt/android-sdk