You may consider yourself an expert Android programmer, and you might even have successful apps published in Google Play Store, but sometimes, IDEs are so easy and helpful, that we forget to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes. This graph extracted from http://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/preparing.html and very well explained by the guys at http://www.bignerdranch.com/, explains every step that is happening when we click on the “Run” button. After understanding it, some technicisms that we often see in the log messages (aapt, zipalign, Dx, dex, dalvik) may sound more familiar for us.