Google Android Studio Vs. Eclipse: Which Fits Your Needs?

Nerval's Lobster writes "Google's Android Studio is a development tool for Android based on the IntelliJ IDEA platform, one that managed to attract a lot of hype when it rolled out in mid-2013. Roughly a year later, the platform is still in 'early access preview,' and work on it is ongoing. Eclipse, on the other hand, is the granddaddy of IDEs; although it doesn't offer native Android support, it does have some nice tools to help you build Android applications—one such tool is the Google Plugin for Eclipse, made by Google. Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell compares Eclipse and its Google-made Google Plugin with Google's own Android Studio, developed with the help of the people who make IntelliJ IDEA. His verdict? Eclipse is beginning to show its age, especially when it comes to Android development, while Android Studio offers some noted benefits. 'Android Studio is still in preview mode, without an official release, even if that preview is in pretty fine shape—its status certainly shouldn't prevent you from using it, at least in my opinion,' he writes. Do you agree?"

Re:Horrible article

[stewsters]

Intellij supports both, I used a non-gradle build last week. Not sure about the Android Studio version, but I can imagine it's possible, just not the default in the basic project setup. That being said, gradle is nice if you have a lot of dependencies in maven.

Re:Not surprising

[metamatic]

Yup, I switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA for my regular Java development as well as Android.

It's faster, leaner, more helpful, and has a far less cluttered UI.

I just wish it wasn't $199, I'd totally buy a personal license for $99. (There's zero chance of my employer buying it for me.)

Re:Horrible article

[farble1670]

Both ANT and Maven represent your build script as huge horrific XML files

you are really going to pick your build system on how pretty the script is?

yes, because the most important thing to me in a build system that my build scripts be as few characters as possible, right? the only thing that matters is stability and lots of good examples of how to do things you want to do.

That and ANT is goddamn slow.

ant was lightning fast compared to gradle. and yeah, i know because our company has fully cut over from eclipse + ant to android studio + gradle.

it takes nearly 30s to build just one of our android apps. upgrading from gradle 1.6 > 1.8 > 1.11, each upgrade has considerably worse performance, despite the docs claiming to have improved performance. gradle 1.11 is so much slower than 1.8 it's ridiculous. i can't even believe it was released. it does however give a progress indicator during the build now. great.