Finding Android SDK on Mac and adding to PATH

If you don't want to open Android Studio just to modify your path...

They live here with a default installation:

${HOME}/Library/Android/sdk/tools
${HOME}/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools

Here's what you want to add to your .bashwhatever

export PATH="${HOME}/Library/Android/sdk/tools:${HOME}/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools:${PATH}"

Find the Android SDK location

Android Studio 
  > Preferences
  > Appearance & Behaviour
  > System Settings 
  > Android SDK
  > Android SDK Location

Create a .bash_profile file for your environment variables

  • Open the Terminal app
  • Go to your home directory via cd ~
  • Create the file with touch .bash_profile

Add the PATH variable to your .bash_profile

  • Open the file via open .bash_profile
  • Add export PATH=$PATH: [your SDK location] /platform-tools to the file and hit ⌘s to save it. By default it's:

    export PATH=$PATH:/Users/yourUserName/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools

  • Go back to your Terminal App and load the variable with source ~/.bash_profile


1. How to find it

  • Open Android studio, go to Android Studio > Preferences
  • Search for sdk
  • Something similar to this (this is a Windows box as you can see) will show

You can see the location there – most of the time it is:

/Users/<name>/Library/Android/sdk

2. How to install it, if not there

  • Go to Android standalone SDK download page
  • Download the zip file for macOS
  • Extract it to a directory

Standalone SDK download page

3. How to add it to the path

Open your Terminal edit your ~/.bash_profile file in nano by typing:

nano ~/.bash_profile

If you use Zsh, edit ~/.zshrc instead.

Go to the end of the file and add the directory path to your $PATH:

export PATH="${HOME}/Library/Android/sdk/tools:${HOME}/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools:${PATH}"
  • Save it by pressing Ctrl+X
  • Restart the Terminal
  • To see if it is working or not, type in the name of any file or binary which are inside the directories that you've added (e.g. adb) and verify it is opened/executed

  1. How do I find Android SDK on my machine? Or prove to myself it's not there?

When you install Android studio, it allows you to choose if you want to download SDK or not

  1. If it's not there how do I install it?

you can get SDK from here http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

  1. How do I change PATH to include Android SDK?

in Android Studio click in File >> Settings enter image description here