You may think its pretty hard to setup everything on windows. But after I found chocolatey the process is deadly simple. Chocolatey is the package manager for windows. Like homebrew for Mac, you can use Chocolatey to install all react-native dependencies and let chocolatey setup system PATH for you automatically.
Sounds good? let's install react-native on windows.
The very first step is install chocolatey via [following its instuction]https://chocolatey.org/install).
Then install git, node, android-sdk
C:\> choco install git nvm android-sdk
And you can download the latest node version via command
nvm install 8.4.0
Note that Java Development Kit (JDK) is also installed when you install android-sdk, neat!
As I mentioned earlier, the SYSTEM PATH are automatically set so you can run android command on cmd or the alternative to open up the SDK manager after install is complete!
Once you can open android SDK manager, check Getting Started section in React Native doc to find out which android SDK versions to download.
You can also check Chocolatey's package list to install a editor. Since its windows, I'll give Visual Studio Code a try:
c:\> choco install visualstudiocode
Now you are on the fast track to install react-native, its all node related instructions now.
c:\> npm install -g create-react-native-app
c:\> create-react-native-app sample
c:\> cd sample
c:\sample> npm start
Happy coding!