Android Studio vs Visual Studio Code

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Android Studio uses Gradle as the official build tool for projects, moving away from the now outdated Apache Ant.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

Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality.

There is very solid TypeScript integration in Visual Studio Code. Both are developed by Microsoft and VSC itself is written in TypeScript.

VSC includes debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript.

You don't need to configure and add plugins before being productive. However, you can add plugins if needed but for the basics you're well covered.

There's no need to press alt+tab to go to a terminal: it is directly integrated into the editor. Shift+~ is a handy hotkey to toggle the integrated terminal.

For a 'wrapped' web-based application, Visual Studio Code performs very well.

Released under the MIT License.

VS-Code has the speed of Sublime and the power of WebStorm. Perhaps this is the best software that Microsoft has ever created.

JavaScript IntelliSense allows Visual Studio Code to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code.

Visual Studio Code has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.

There's a new release of Visual Studio Code every month. If you are one of the insiders then releases are daily.

ESLint integrates great. You can define your rules trough .eslintrc.* as usual and vs code will autofix your code on save. So your code is always in style.

Extensions are written in either Typescript or JavaScript.

It's really nice to see how the code editor evolves. Every month there is a new version with great communication of new features and changes.

Task runners display lists of available tasks and performing these tasks is as simple as a click of the mouse.

All it takes is one stop for all the features many people need.

Snippets are templates that will insert text for you and adapt it to their context, and in VSC they are highly customizable.

The ease of getting assistance and finding tutorials is increasing as the community grows.

It leverages TypeScript compiler functionality to statically type check JS (type inference, JSDoc types) with "javascript.implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true option.

Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension.

The Omnisharp plugin is very powerful providing full sln, csproj, and project.json support.

It supports pretty web rtl languages like arabic languages when most of other editors don't support it.

These features allow you to have a glance at code without opening it as a whole in a separate tab. Moreover, editing is allowed.