Slant community chat on Discourse| 3 Recommended Products | Recommendations | Platforms | Auto Complete | Cross Platform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 IntelliJ IDEA· · · | 5 | 0 | Windows, macOS, Linux | Yes | Yes |
| #2 Android Studio· · · | 5 | 0 | – | – | – |
| #3 Eclipse + Android Development Tools plugin· · · | 3 | 1 | Windows, Mac(OS), Linux | – | – |
Pro Clear and detailed documentation
The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate and clearly worded.
Pro Fast and smart contextual assistance
Uses a fast indexing technique to provide contextual hints (auto-completion, available object members, import suggestions). On-the-fly code analysis to detect errors and propose refactorization.
Pro Fast and smart contextual assistance
Uses a fast indexing technique to provide contextual hints (auto-completion, available object members, import suggestions). On-the-fly code analysis to detect errors and propose refactorization.
Con Somewhat expensive
IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year. However there is a free community edition available.
Pro Extremely easy to integrate Google Services
Because it's made by Google to be the tool to be used for Android Development, it's also very easy for Google to add great support for their services in the IDE and make it easier to integrate Google Services into Android applications built with Studio.
Pro Extremely fast preview
Since Android 2.0, Google have been focusing more and more on the IDE's speed, going so far as making it 2-2.5 times faster than older versions. But the greatest feature when it comes to speed though is the new feature called "Instant Run". This is comparable to writing HTML, where y...
Con Apps run slow on the ARM version of the emulator
While the Android team have recently fixed issues that had to do with emulation on an x86 architecture and greatly improving emulator speeds, emulating an Android device and running apps on an ARM architecture is still pretty slow.
Con Android development only
Android Studio is the official IDE for Android and it works great as an Android IDE. Unfortunately, that's the only thing it can do, if you want to develop applications for other platforms in Java, you have to learn another IDE as well.
Pro Good font rendering
Because Eclipse is based on SWT, it uses the native font rendering and thus looks better than other IDEs on some Linux systems, where the Java font rendering is not optimal.
Pro Highly customizable
Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options, Eclipse is very customizable.
Con May lose support in the future
Google recommends moving away from Eclipse for Android Development, plugins and features are adopted much later from Eclipse than from Android Studio or IntelliJ IDEA and in the future the ADT plugin may be abandoned altogether.
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.
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