It's possible to build without gradle by calling the sdk tools for bundling and signing directly (for instance from make or cmake), but Android Studio is at least useful for debugging the resulting apk (AS also works as "standalone debugger" for debugging an apk built elsewhere).

> curl -k "https://dl.google.com/android/repository/commandlinetools-li..." -o commandlinetools-linux.zip

unzip somewhere, set path variable

> yes | sdkmanager --licenses && sdkmanager "platform-tools" && sdkmanager "ndk-bundle" && sdkmanager "build-tools;33.0.0" "platforms;android-33"

This is better indeed, but from recollection last time I tried this.. I think that still requires a full OpenJDK installation and I believe those `sdkmanager` commands install multiple GB of tools sadly.

Yes to both OpenJDK and large size.

Not sure how useful this is but here's a gist that runs through the process without needing Android Studio: https://gist.github.com/jonnybrooks/13c6cbae832e7d1662e6c143...

>I'd love to see a way to build a Flutter app without Gradle.

You generally don't need to touch gradle at all with flutter. Is your issue about having to install gradle onto your machine, even if you don't use it directly?

Yes, it’s mostly hidden, but it runs Gradle behind the scenes and that’s okay as long as nothing goes wrong.

(I used to work on it, or at least tried to before giving up in frustration.)

>I used to work on it, or at least tried to before giving up in frustration.

Out of interest, what blockers did you encounter using Flutter? For me it was much better than native android in terms of development, but it could depend on the usecase.

> Is there a way to just download an Android SDK?

Yes, you can just grab the zip files. For example like this: https://www.hanshq.net/command-line-android.html#sdk