New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
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Reasonable options: yes. Rational ones: maybe not.
You can download Android tools (such as adb) without Android Studio. You can, therefore. develop using Android-specific libraries, and then load the application onto the phone. What you lose out on is the automagical version checking ("does this feature work with older devices?") and the ease of an environment that's aware of your target platform.
You can also check out the Processing project at https://processing.org - it's Java, and has a feature to export to Android, and as I recall it only requires adb, not the full Android Studio.
Finally, there are other options entirely. For instance, NativeScript at nativescript.org allows you to develop for phones and devices without Java.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for this article. I'm using Cool Reader now because of this. It works great; I load ebooks onto my SD card, launch Cool Reader, and open the file to read. And it looks great, which was definitely not a strong point of my former ebook reading app.