Android Studio vs NetBeans IDE

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.

Unlike its 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).

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.

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.

Android Studio uses Gradle as the official build tool for projects, moving away from the now outdated Apache Ant.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.

Pushing to the built-in Android emulator can be up to 10 times faster than pushing to a physical device.

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.

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

Linux, Windows, and Mac are supported.

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.

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.

NetBeans is a free, GPL-licensed IDE. It can run on any computer with a Java virtual machine. If a computer has a Java virtual machine (JVM), Netbeans can run on it. Netbeans can, therefore, run on a variety of operating systems such as Windows, *nix, and Mac OS.

NetBeans has out-of-the-box support for Maven (NetBeans 6.7 and newer), which includes a repository browser.

Very easy to learn, unlike e.g. Eclipse (which is probably the most flexible).