Which one should you use? Or a huge Fortune 1000 corporation with a team of dozens or even hundreds of employees? Drag and Drop Gui Designer One supposedly great feature of Android Studio is its layout designer with a drag-and-drop interface. Verdict: Draw Code Completion The more time you spend as a programmer grinding out code, the more you appreciate code completion. For me personally, the most important part is when the IDE tells me the member names of an object. Of course, you can integrate with other cloud platforms, but Android Studio makes Google integration easier. Android Studio also offers tools for integrating apps, testing and running server-side code locally, and deploying to a Google backend server; in other words, everything you need at least for a start is there. But all of this functionality is also available in Eclipse, via the Google Plugin for Eclipse. Additional tools let you integrate with the servers such as the cloud database. Verdict: Draw User Interface Eclipse is big, and perhaps a bit cumbersome. With that in mind, I find that the menu items and tools in Android Studio tend to get me where I need to be a bit more quickly and easily compared to their counterparts in Eclipse, even with the Android plugin. When you want to work on multiple projects in Eclipse, you combine them into a workspace. In order to switch to a different workspace, you select the path, and then Eclipse restarts. That always seemed awkward to me. With Android Studio, everything is encapsulated into a project. So in this sense, a project in Android Studio is more like a workspace in Eclipse. If you have a library, that will be another module. But other things qualify as a module as well, such as build scripts. To me, this makes a good bit more sense and seems much more natural to me. Eclipse was certainly built to be an expandable platform; but the core product, the IDE itself, is starting to show its age. Another, perhaps more important issue with switching to Android Studio is Gradle. If your team is a huge corporation with layers upon layers of middle management, such a switch usually requires somebody up that path to agree to it. From a technical perspective, switching might not be difficult—but from a managerial perspective, it might be a nightmare. If it fits the bill, then go ahead and switch. Create some of the sample applications and see how comfortable you are in it. Otherwise, give it a chance. Conclusion Should you switch from Eclipse to Android Studio? I say try it. Have been using Eclipse for quite sometime now, for all sorts of languages Python, PHP, Java and I find it comforting and productive, provided you have a somewhat decent computer and definitely lots of RAM help. Eclipse as any Java application will no eat more memory then you allocate it eclipse. The Eclipse community is larger and can provide you with support for all those Eclipse problems. Although you can find some support for Android Studio I found is not as plentiful and gave up on it pretty much in frustration every time. Given the size and resources as a company to produce such poor support and development pace to Eclipse support for Android development is astounding. Not cool, Google, not cool at all. I totally agree with the comments above. There is a learning curve to use Idea as an IDE of choice and so far I am not impressed. Eclipse may be old but it is tried and trusted and in the hands of an expert user, it can improve productivity by a huge factor. If google prefer to use IDEA, they must at least continue to improve and provide releases for Eclipse. KiguruNganga Lovely review you have done on both IDEs, I like the whole play by play aspect of it all. We are using Android Studio for a few months already a two projects and find it quite good. So for new projects I can recommend it. But for the low traffic old project we stick with the Eclipse. I did all this in java in eclipse. I tried every example of GPS on the net and every one bombed. I assumed I was missing an SDK module so I went to the manager and installed about 17. I found some fix on a web site and was able to run my old apps then I went to build a new one and hopefully get GPS to work. I created the project but all kinds of errors and NO GRAPHIC PHONE. That is what brings me to this site. You are right that there a bunch of support out there which tells me that there is plenty of issues with eclipse. I plan on giving AS a try just because I am so sick of eclipse. I have spent way too many hours in it with no results. Yes, some things have improved e. Christine In Eclipse, I can move a package around by dragging it. Which makes refactoring packages a lot more work. It collapses my methods, which I find confusing. We develop for android using tools that is best suited to our needs. I think all android developers need to have a vote on this and send google a letter of discontent! But I used Android Studio to make my first app. I was able to get some support from stackoverflow. And I also had some experience programming in college. I would like to develop a more complex application however I may need eclipse to do this. The rest of us prefer the many options that Eclipse has to offer which includes Gradle. Personally, I think your choice of Android Studio over Eclipse in that regard says something about the kind of programmer you are — though your verdict there is probably best attributed to your love of Google. Being able to work on two or more projects at once is a valuable feature that I find myself using quite often; if I only want to work on one project, I can just close any other tabs and minimize other projects in the package explorer. In my opinion, Android Studio is for lazy people who would rather waste a few gigabytes than spend a few minutes online learning how to use the Google Plugin with Eclipse because everything has to be handed to them on a silver platter. Eclipse gives you much more control — provided you take the time and learn how to use it. An expert in C++ and JavaScript, he has experience starting from low-level C development on Linux, up through modern Web development in JavaScript and jQuery, PHP, and ASP.
