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The fact that they're doing this with Jetbrains excites me. Potentially enough for me to take another shot at playing with Android development. The toolset felt so raw the last time I messed around with it (Eclipse+ADT days) that it turned me (not a Java developer) off.
I have been super impressed with PyCharm, and have heard great things about some of their other IDEs. Google picked the right partner to build on/with for this.
If they have sufficiently smoothed over some of the annoying workflow/build snags I was running into in the old Eclipse+ADT days, this could be a whole new ballgame for us who don't play with Java or Android for a living.
Senior Android Dev here, moved from Eclipse to AS when it was still in preview earlier in the year. It's loads more stable and much easier to use. Definitely recommend giving it a go if you were turned off by Eclipse + ADT earlier.
Gradle is pretty tightly integrated with the IDE now, and in general I find myself rarely having to troubleshoot build problems with Android studio. Adding new dependencies is as simple as adding a single line to the build.gradle file, it's great.
Happy paid PyCharm user here. I'll definitely look this up.
The only criticism I have of jetbrains is that their support isn't the best. My experience has been that you can get faster and better answers by scouring the 'net than by using their support system or forum. They need to hire someone to own this and bring it into compliance with what is to be expected when you pay for a software products. I have software products costing around the same as PyCharm that have massively better support.
Again, love PyCharm, will continue to use it and recommend it, I just think they need to do better on this one area.
Actually, as a non-Java programmer who has been attempting to use Eclipse from time to time over the years, I can tell you that it's actually pretty good for Java. But just for Java. With that said, Android Studio is superior for me. If I'd known it's a Jetbrains thing from the start, I would probably go with it immediately. Eclipse also seemed like the 1st choice according to the Android developer docs at the time (I hope they update(d?) that), so that threw me off too.
AS has been my first exposure to Java and I find it very intuitive to work with. The last 4 months in particular have seen a lot of improvements. I use it with Genymotion and real devices.
I hated Android Studio when I first started using it. All my shortcuts were different from Eclipse, and the whole module structure wasn't as intuitive for me (I stayed away from IntelliJ too). However, after using it for the last 6 months, I have to say, it is a huge improvement for Android Development. There are soo many slick IDE features, like icon previews to the left of the editor, smart code collapsing (done automatically by the IDE without modifying the source), preview's on text resources, UI preview's that put Eclipse + ADT to shame, and very very nice gradle integration.
And at this point I freaking love gradle over Ant. I use to be an Ant fanatic (which isn't saying much), but gradle gives so much more structure to my builds now, and Maven is no longer such a pain in the ass.
I've started later with Android Development than you did. So I've just used Eclipse for a pretty short time.
To be honest, I can't stand those different views (e.g. when starting to debug). The resource editor with its live preview is so much better in Android Studio. Showing the content of the string instead of just showing the ID - there are so many little things which are far better than with Eclipse. I really like the decision to go with JetBrains instead of Eclipse.
You've likely already discovered this, but in the off chance not, you can set your keymap to match Eclipse. Just go in Preferences > Keymap, and select Eclipse or Eclipse OS X from the dropdown.
Also interesting is that the Eclipse based ADT is no longer being maintained. Guess there's no choice but to migrate. http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/migrate.html
It's for the best. Android Studio today is far better than Eclipse+ADT ever was. Maintaining two entire toolsets would be wasteful. Clearly Google decided it was easier to build the tools they wanted on top of IntelliJ than on top of Eclipse, even accounting for having to start over. That speaks volumes about the two platforms.
For a time Android Studio was unstable and not feature complete[1], there were valid reasons to stay with Eclipse. These days the only people that aren't happy about it are those that prefer Eclipse to IntelliJ. That certainly is a valid opinion, but there were people that preferred IntelliJ to Eclipse the first time around. You can never please everyone.
[1] Yes, I know NDK support isn't yet in Android Studio, it is coming.
> Also interesting is that the Eclipse based ADT is no longer being maintained.
It was announced quite a while ago that ADT was being abandoned and that Android Studio would replace it when available.
Those of us doing C++ on Android still cannot.
Yes, Eclipse is pretty much busted now due to Google Play packages using .aar (you have to just copy the .jars into your Eclipse project now) and Android Studio is an uphill battle if you are already using Gradle, since it uses a newer version that probably wasn't compatible with your third-party plugins.
As a strongly leaning iOS developer, something like the "Xcode for Android" was something that was holding me back from committing more to experimenting on the platform. The fact that Instruments, Interface Builder, etc are integrated well alongside the editor is huge and I think Google is wise to invest here.
Developers, developers, developers!
What? You don't hate XCode? How?! ;)
I've only learned to really appreciate Android Studio after I went back to Eclipse for a project, and felt the sharp drop in productivity.
Jetbrains sure know how to produce an awesome IDE.
I'm in 2 minds regarding Studio. On the one hand, I'm a whiz at Eclipse and Maven, and because time is so precious, I have no motivation to learn Gradle, and so I use the excellent android-maven-plugin[1]. (I'm also dependent when using Eclipse on the Emacs+ plugin for Emacs key bindings) When learning a new language / platform, I'm fine with learning its "standard" build tool, but with Android dev, I wish I could use Maven. I just can't emotionally bring myself to have to spend brain energy on yet another build tool chain for Java dev (I'm already juggling "build tool chain" knowledge for iOS dev and Clojure dev, just to name a couple).
On the other hand, I want to be using the best and latest tools, and stay up to date with what the broader Android dev community is doing.
Would love to hear from others with similar feelings...
Very interesting. I had been using development under Linux under Eclipse for a long time and found it alright, although recent moves to Mac OSX as the fulltime development system meant it felt awkward under OSX (and upgrades between Eclipse versions always broke something).
Anyway, having installed the JDK 8 u25 on Mac OSX, Android Studio wouldn't run. You need to export:
export STUDIO_JDK=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_25.jdk
Modify .bash_profile in your home directory to get that to stick.
Android Studio has become a good, mature IDE. Having had to go back to Eclipse for my current project, the positive difference is vast once you get deeper into it. I still believe Eclipse is far superior on Windows than it is on Mac- the usability and scrolling performance is terrible on retina Mac.
This brings me to my most wanted feature in Android Studio - smooth native scrolling! Right now it scrolls lines-at-a-time rather than pixels-at-a-time, which is slightly annoying. Eclipse on Windows was very nice in this respect.
Finally, all the languages for all localized strings in one big, massive table. For all us >10 languages polyglots out there.
It's deeply disappointing to see Google moving to a proprietary IDE for Android. I've wasted time in the past learning proprietary development environments, and it's not a mistake I want to repeat — years of muscle memory and ecosystem knowledge down the drain when the IDE owner went out of business or didn't support the new platform I wanted to develop for — but it seems like now I have very little choice if I want to develop for Android. I mean, Eclipse will still work, at least unless Google breaks it, but it's falling by the wayside.
It's also alarming to me that nobody else here on Hacker News seems to be concerned about this.
I know Google isn't a free-software business like Red Hat, but they've benefited enormously from the work of the free software community, in particular in building Android, and they touted Android as being open. It was inspiring to see a really open phone platform birthed, but every month it seems like Android is less and less open. Supporting only a proprietary development toolchain is one more step toward the dark side.
How about support for NDK (C++ development) ? Does the Android Studio ships with support for C++ editing ?
Great to see Android Studio reaching 1.0
I'm also a happy user of IDEA CE 14 for Dart.
JetBrains et al really built an impressive IDE platform. I'm glad there are open source alternatives to Eclipse.
I don't see any mention of NDK support. Has studio added that yet? Also, is ADT support going to continue? I really prefer eGit to whatever ships with studio.
I realise this is subjective but how hard have people found
converting over to Android Studio for someone used to Eclipse? I was taught to use Eclipse in university and having been using it full time at my job for the last couple of months so its workflow is quite ingrained in me.
My first thought was "oh PLEASE, let them keep distributing the CLI-only SDK".
Why?
Because I got burned by Eclipse so many times I got used to developing solely with vim and ant - then I started using NetBeans+NBAndroid and found it comfortable enough.
Still, now that it's 1.0 I'll eventually migrate.
Glad to see this reach final. Have been using it since the first alpha release at I/O 13 and it's been getting better and better.
Has there been any word about their Android Go project? Would be awesome now that they are updating all their development tools.
Does anyone know if I can customize the IntelliJ with plugins to be exactly equal to Android Studio? Is this possible?
I switched to Android Studio just a couple months ago and the main deficiency I've found compared to Eclipse is that it doesn't auto-build the project on every change so you can immediately see all breakage. I'm constantly hitting "Rebuild Project" because someone decided it couldn't be done for me.
As for advantages over Eclipse, they've been minor. No real big improvements except the automatic dependency management of Gradle.
The reason for the giant effort to switch the entire ecosystem over is a bit mysterious to me.
Can these features be added to a vanilla Intelij install? What will happen to the existing Android plugin?
as someone who uses gradle everyday I cant express my disappointment enough. I cant think of any greater dev friction th an the incredibly slow gradle builds I deal with daily - not to mention the langue. its like someone wanted to redesign javascript poorly.
How do you delete a project?
Why do they make it SO HARD to even delete a project?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16710290/how-to-delete-a-...
I've been using it almost since day one, and professionally too. The frustrating thing was compatibility breaking, mostly associated with Gradle. Every second upgrade, I had to spend a while getting my project to build again. Yes, I'm new to Gradle. I only learned the required minimum, I should get to know it in-depth. But I have work to do in meantime. Fortunately, this integration is constantly improving.
I've been using Android Studio for a while now, and greatly prefer it over Eclipse ADT (being phased out anyway, and thankfully so) but I've had a lot of trouble getting my projects from earlier versions of Android Studio up to date - it's always a form of a gradle incompatibility; Android Studio is great when it works, but it's been a rocky path to 1.0.
How does this compare to the combo of C# + Visual Studio (which seems to be the target market here)?
Eclipse + Java has always been a non-intuitive headache for me - will this IDE support Python? Has Google made Python a first-class language yet in their stack?
Inquisitive minds would like to know.
OK that's cool it's based o IntelliJ IDEA. Now only if Google comes up with a faster emulator it will help many of us to take Android seriously. Seriously I can't wait light years to test my Hello World script.
Is Google planning to release a 2d graphics library like SpriteKit but for Android?
android studio is really good.
but gradle is annoying me.
every gradle-build project force me to download a new gradle-wrapper.
I install the newest gralde in my OS, but it can not be use repeatedly
Emacs and command line tools still for the win!
Finally making the switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ
Late 2014, a single-target-OS IDE is released - makes me chuckle :).
I`m using.
Their main Android Developer website, and their 'Getting Start' docs seem to have been updated for Android Studio, too, respectively.
https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
https://developer.android.com/training/index.html
Things are looking good for Android development, especially with regards to Firebase being acquired.
Should I get this or just keep using Intellj?
hopefully they improved resiliency. my first experience with android studio beta was: 1. create one project and close it 2. edit single file outside. 3. reopen project on android studio and watch it go down in flames.
Call me when I can develop android apps from within an android device.