Google has graduated Android Studio to 1.0 and is recommending developers to leave Eclipse behind.
Android Studio was first announced at Google I/O 2013 and has been under development ever since with almost a dozen of intermediate releases. Not only Google made it reach GA, but they call it now the “official IDE,” according to Jamal Eason, Product Manager for Android, showing its importance for the Android team which is distancing from the Eclipse-based tool. Google now strongly recommends developers to use Android Studio and to migrate their projects to it in order to benefit from the “latest IDE updates”. This JetBrains FAQ webpage explains in greater detail the issues related to migrating from Eclipse to an IntelliJ IDEA-based IDE.
Android Studio is based on IntelliJ Community Edition and version 1.0 has been recently announced with these major features:
- An installer that sets up the correct Android SDK and a development environment with an optimized emulator and a set of code templates
- All code editing tools as provided by IntelliJ IDEA
- Dynamic Layout Preview enabling users to see and edit via drag&drop how their mobile app appears on multiple devices and across API versions
- Memory performance monitor
- Gradle-based build system that is integrated with Studio but it is not affected by Studio updates
- The build system can generate multiple apks for debug/release, free/paid app
- Integration with Google Cloud Platform
- Lint tools to deal with performance, usability, version compatibility, and other issues
- ProGuard and app-signing capabilities
Android Studio has taken the path of Chrome with 4 development channels - Stable, Beta, Dev, and Canary – developers having the option to see the new features in advance before they become generally available. There are downloads for Windows 8/7/Vista/2003 32 or 64-bit, Mac OS X 10.8.5-10.9, and Linux. This guide introduces developers to Android Studio including installation instructions, main features, using it, tips&tricks, etc.