Slant community chat on Discord| 3 Recommended Products | Recommendations | Platforms | Cross Platform | Auto Complete |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 Android Studio· · · | 4 | 0 | – | – | – |
| #2 IntelliJ IDEA· · · | 3 | 0 | Windows, macOS, Linux | Yes | Yes |
| #3 Eclipse + Android Development Tools plugin· · · | 2 | 1 | – | – | – |
Pro Uses the powerful Gradle build tool out of the box
Android Studio uses Gradle as the official build tool for projects, moving away from the now outdated Apache Ant. Gradle is a powerful build tool, especially for Android development with which it's very easy to do things that are otherwise impossible or very hard to do on other build systems,...
Pro Pushes fast to the built-in emulator
Pushing to the built-in Android emulator can be up to 10 times faster than pushing to a physical device.
Pro Intelligently replaces values
References are automatically replaced with their real values, so you can easily view which color you are using for example.
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 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.
Con Somewhat expensive
IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year. However there is a free community edition available.
Pro Free and open source
Eclipse is a free and open source software, it's released under the Eclipse Public license.
Pro Java programming language and XML editors
Has full support for both Java and XML.
Con Ugly Interface
Eclipse has an unattractive interface, and has no easy way to use themes.
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.
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