Cordova and Android SDK installing on Windows 7 and 8 for Hybrid Mobile Apps Development

1: Download and Install Java

Download and install a recent release of the Java SDK for your computer.
You should be able to open a new instance of cmd.exe and run java without problems. If not (you made sure to open a new cmd window, right?), then open your system environment variables, and add to or create a new user variable called PATH with the full path to the bin folder of the new Java SDK installation.

2: Download Apache Ant

Apache Ant is needed by Android and Cordova for building projects.
Download and extract this zip file somewhere on your computer: http://mirror.tcpdiag.net/apache//ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.9.4-bin.zip
Add the full path to the bin/ folder to the end of your PATH environment variable.

3: Download the Android SDK

Go and download the Android SDK:

3: Add Android to PATH

We need to tell Windows where our Android SDK lives.
Open up your environment variables setting and add the full path to both the adt-bundle/sdk/platform-tools/ folder and the adt-bundle/sdk/tools/ folder to the end of your PATH variable:

You should be able to open a new cmd.exe instance, and run android to see the list of android targets you can install.
Go ahead and install version 19 for now, which will give us support for developing for Android 4.4 (target older versions for older Androids).

4: Install or update Node.js

Download the most recent version of Node.js. If you are running an older version of Node, make sure to update it because older versions had issues with npm.
As with the other commands, nodejs should now function in cmd.exe but just to be careful, add the full path to the bin folder in Node to your PATH, which will look something like C:\Program Files\nodejs\bin.

5: Install Cordova

Open a new cmd.exe window, and run:

$ npm install -g cordova
        

6: Install Ionic

In the same cmd.exe window, run:

$ npm install -g ionic
        

7: Start a project

Now that everything is installed, we can finally create an Ionic project! Go ahead and run:

$ ionic start myapp
        $ ionic platform add android
        

Which should complete. If you run into an issue with an error related to plugman (a Cordova issue), you’ll need to manually create the folder $USER\AppData\Local\Temp\plugman\git and run it again.

8: Build, test, deploy!

Everything should be working now. To test it, try doing ionic build android and then connect a device or Genymotion instance and run ionic run android
Please let us know if you encounter any issues and we will revise this tutorial.