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What are the best IDEs for Android development in Java?

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Apr 13, 2018

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Here’s the Deal

3 Options Considered

Best IDEs for Android development in Java	Price	Platforms	Price
-- Android Studio	-	Windows, macOS, Linus	Free
-- IntelliJ IDEA	-	Windows, macOS, Linux	US $ 499. 00-US $ 649. 00 year
-- Eclipse + Android Development Tools plugin	-	Windows, Mac(OS), Linux	Windows, Mac(OS), Linux

Android Studio

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Top Pro

Officially supported by Google

Android Studio is the software built by Google themselves to be used for Android Development. As such, it's certain that support for it will never drop as long as Android apps are still being developed. Studio is also the tool that Google recommends using for Android development and it's the IDE that gets updates related to Android first. See More

Top 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. See More

iboyperson's Experience

Andoid Studio is an enhanced version of IntelliJ and is officially supported by google See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linus

Latest Version :3.0 (Stable), 3.0RC (Preview)

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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Android Studio uses Gradle as the official build tool for projects, moving away from the now outdated Apache Ant.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, thing like: upgrading the build system without breaking the project itself or allowing you to separately define the development and production versions. See More

Top 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 you write the HTML and just refresh te page to see the changes. On mobile though, updating anything would take a lot of time for the system to rebuild. Instant Run allows developers to build their app once (on physical devices, emulator or both) and as they change their code, AS does hot code swapping where it only updates the parts of the code that have been changed and the developer can see those changes after a second or two. See More

Top Pro

Intelligently replaces values

References are automatically replaced with their real values, so you can easily view which color you are using for example. See More

Top Pro

Can test Google Play Services API straight from the emulator

Since the built-in emulator has Google Play Services like a physical device, you can test a lot of API calls without having to deploy your application to a device. See More

Top Pro

Live code updates and renderings of app

Layouts are built and can be observed in real time and are automatically updated after every change. You can even see these changes on different screens. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Allows GPU tracking

For graphics-intensive apps or games, Android Studio has a GPU profiler baked in. With this you can see exactly what is happening inside the device when a new image is drawn on the screen. See More

Top Pro

Based on the powerful IntelliJ IDEA

Unlike it's predecessor, which is based off Eclipse, Android Studio is build on top of Jetbrain's Flagship Java IDE which offers over a number of features. It's also open-source too (Community Edition only). See More

IntelliJ IDEA

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Clear and detailed documentation

The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate and clearly worded. See More

Top Con

Somewhat expensive

IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year. However there is a free community edition available. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

Price:US $ 499. 00-US $ 649. 00 year

Cross Platform:Yes

Auto Complete:Yes

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Free version available

There is a free community edition (open source) and an ultimate edition, which you can compare here. The ultimate edition is available for free for one year for students but must be registered through an .edu e-mail account. See More

Top Pro

Lots of plugins

Many plugins are available for almost any task a developer may need to cover. Plugins are developed by Jetbrains themselves or by 3rd parties through the SDK available for writing them. See More

Top Pro

Intuitive and slick UI

IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme). See More

Top Pro

Stable and robust

If any file was corrupted by the IDE you don't have to restart your project. See More

Top Pro

Smart refactorings

IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a variety of features to make this possible for a variety of languages. These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates. See More

Eclipse + Android Development Tools plugin

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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. See More

Top 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. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac(OS), Linux

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options, Eclipse is very customizable. See More

Top Con

Ugly Interface

Eclipse has an unattractive interface, and has no easy way to use themes. See More

Top Pro

Java programming language and XML editors

Has full support for both Java and XML. See More

Top Pro

Large selection of plugins

Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Eclipse is a free and open source software, it's released under the Eclipse Public license. See More

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