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As of 2015, I see that Android studio is an official IDE for developing android applications according to information on their official site and on each page of their site, there is a note suggesting to go for Android studio rather than Eclipse with ADT.

Note: If you have been using Eclipse with ADT, be aware that Android Studio is now the official IDE for Android, so you should migrate to Android Studio to receive all the latest IDE updates.

But I haven't found any latest article about the pros and cons in choosing the IDE or eclipse with ADT. If some one can throw some light on it then it would help other beginners like me in choosing the right app for android development

0xC0DED00D
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kittu
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15 Answers15

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IMO everything you can do with Android Studio (gradle, maven, etc) you can do it with Eclipse faster and easier and i mean "faster, easier" because in Eclipse if any problems arises like "error XX" you do a quick search on yahoo/google/whatever and thousands of results appears of guys who had the same problem and how to fix it.

I've been programming with Eclipse for C/C++ and Java over 8 years already switching to IntelliJ for me is a total waste of time with translates in a huge loss of money, all my clients wants their apps for yesterday and i can't have the luxury of "playing" and wasting time tweaking a really different IDE while i have bills to pay. So in my case i will 100% stay with Eclipse.

D.Snap
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  • Thanks a lot for your valuable information. – kittu May 08 '15 at 10:35
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    You are kidding right? Have you used Android Studio? The reason you say this is the same reason aged developers end up without jobs. Because you get comfortable and don't adapt with the new. I would be more worried of not paying bills because you are still building yesterdays applications. Any starter should use the suggested IDE not an IDE that will be soon dead for native mobile practical application. If you enjoy learning or building the latest and greatest applications use Android Studio. If you feel like being complacent use Eclipse. – Eugene H Sep 27 '15 at 22:13
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    @EugeneH Calm down. He is just being practical for his current situation. I would do the same if there's a threat in my career but I really love to learn new technology as well. – mr5 Oct 19 '15 at 03:58
  • @mr5 I understand that but this is not piratical for a beginner. – Eugene H Oct 20 '15 at 16:27
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    @EugeneH Android Studio compiles way slower than eclipse. It is the elephant in the room, and it is not going to be much better in the future because of Gradle. With eclipse it is indeed easier and faster. You don't need to read a Gradle book to do the most common tasks. So I think eclipse is still better suited for beginners or casual development (hello worlds,small prototypes), while AS is the ultra-configurable pro option. – Mister Smith Oct 29 '15 at 19:05
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    @MisterSmith My compile time on Android Studio is no longer than 30 seconds with 8 dependencies. I use both Eclipse and Android Studio. I believe Eclipse has its benefits as does Android Studio. But the question for someone new, they should always start with the Supported Environment. It can be extremely difficult for a beginner to get a grasp of Eclipse while developing for android especially if they are looking to keep up with the latest libraries that Google is updating consistently. It should be smooth to start, which Android Studio provides for beginners. – Eugene H Oct 29 '15 at 19:49
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    @EugeneH You choose the right IDE for the job. In my university for instance, every student is already familiar with eclipse since it is used in many subjects with different plugins. Last year a professor introduced AS as the IDE for a 1 week Android course. It was a hell for most of the students to switch to IntelliJ for such a hello world. Plus there are lots of questions answered about eclipse, and not so many about AS, which in turn has changed considerably in the last two releases. – Mister Smith Oct 29 '15 at 20:06
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    I tried transitioning to Android Studio twice, but the fact that there's no incremental build with a problem view, makes me go back to Eclipse every single time. – Fabian Zeindl Mar 14 '16 at 09:27
  • I had the same issue when I started using android studio. I am a java developer and used eclipse and net beans for whole life. First few days it was very frustrating but after few days it's fine with me. I understand switching over one ide to another is pain but try to stick with it for few days, you learned eclipse, you will learn android studio also(not a rocket science). Though I would love if android has developmnent options for all three IDEs. – Pinaki Mukherjee Mar 28 '16 at 20:34
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    My experience (1) Tried Android Studio 1.5 and found it lagging on my system (8G RAM, 3.6GHz CPU). There was sometimes noticeable latency just for typing text. (2) Then upgraded to version AS 2... and had same issues. (3) Then tried Eclipse, and it's significantly faster and responsive. Although I had to downgrade the API level to 21 to make the GUI editor work. Overall using Eclipse was painful because the online docs are now geared to Android Studio. (4) Finally, went back to Android Studio 2 BUT used a real phone not a simulator to free up my desktop's resources, and that helped with speed. – Rick Giuly Apr 30 '16 at 06:21
  • In my experience (i swtiched from Eclipse to Idea) you loose money using Eclipse. Eclipse has serious issues in many development area (like m2e?), it is not intelligent, the interface is confusing, the workflow is the worse ever seen, it does not hints you in the way it should, JS support is terrible, html lives in another planet, importing projects is pain, eclipse cache is a zombie.... Seriously, get Intellij Idea. – Yuri Blanc Jun 23 '16 at 07:59
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    I don't have a lot of experience with Eclipse, but enough for saying that AS for NDK development is highly worse than Eclipse. – Bazzilla Jun 23 '16 at 14:15
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  • Indexing. Causes AStudio to load up in a matter of years. Afterwards, same a Eclipse. +E

  • Language support. +A

  • Perspectives. One has to actually start fumbling for the different
    windows in AStudio once they need to switch between design / debug / code. This hassle was completely taken care of by the use of
    Perspectives. +E

  • Debugger. Incredibly slow to launch in AStudio. Even Running an app
    takes ages to complete in AStudio. And on the rare occasions it
    doesn't, one ends up with all sorts of exceptions in his app under
    development or plainly app won't install any longer. +E

  • Support. StackOverflow is the main resource in both cases. Just that with Eclipse there is not much need for it. +E

  • UI: AStudio is just eye cancer. Eclipse is such a breeze. +E

  • Building: gradle > ant; but Eclipse also offers mvn. Also, this is
    the main reason of slow run/debug -ing in AStudio and there is no way around it. You just have to swallow the pill and wait 15-20 seconds
    every time you change a line of code. +E

  • Auto-save: just makes me think Google felt I was retarded and this feature would save my life. +E

Final score:

A : E

1 : 7

Which begs the question of why in the world did they switch to AStudio. That being said, we naturally have no say in this, we just blindly follow the Man.

kellogs
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First, Android Studio is created and maintained by Google toolkit development team. That means that seemingly every latest update of Android Development will be pushed to AS at the first time. Second, AS is an integration of different Android Development Tools, including ADT, IntelliJ, Gradle, Maven, Ant...You know, ADT could be pluggin in many different open-source development tools, like Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans...When you migrate projects from one to another, some problems could be caused because they have different programming rules and formats which pains not only developers but also Google's and Android's. That is a question. So Android Studio may be a solution for this.

SilentKnight
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I am a seasoned developer in eclipse adt and recently switched to AS ( Dec 2015) . I should say eclipse is definitely better than AS! True eclipse crashes but so does AS and even more! Eclipse know how a Java developer thinks and thus is very very intuitive. AS crashes blatantly throwing NPEs which is embarrassing! As of now AS is definitely over-hyped. I am sure intellij has done some evil deals with google to push its IDE. People who are voting for AS have definitely not worked in eclipse for long. This debate is becoming more of "Who knows what!" rather than "Which is better!"

Here is an article that I am currently writing. Its high somebody raise his voice:

http://pissedoff-techie.blogspot.in/2016/01/why-android-studio-sucks-over-eclipse.html

Aman Kumar
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Utsav Gupta
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Android Studio's primary problems:

  1. Very slow compilation for debugging. For some of my project Eclipse - 11 sec AS 5 min!
  2. String completion is unusable. For example, completion without parameters. No completion for some operators, for example if, else, for etc.
  3. AS dramatically slows the PC down: mouse and keyboard are periodically freezing.
  4. Project structure is intricated.

So, how to continue using Eclipse if new version of Google Play Services (V30 and higher) is not available for Eclipse but only for AS? This is info how to prepare AS libs (Analytic, ADS, etc) for Eclipse.

malat
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user6560682
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In my opinion:

  • Android Studio is official IDE for Android developer which was provided by Google. So, we can have latest support for updating or any official change from google.

  • Using Android Studio is better than Eclipse for layout. You can code the layout and see the preview [at least, when I answer this question, Android Studio is better than Eclipse]

  • With build.gradle we can easily access share library of others on github.

  • We also can avoid some silly bugs with code analyzer tool of Android Studio (without add any plug-in). And we also can have many other help from it to improve coding style or logic, ... enter image description here

  • I feel mad with the problem of generate R.java on Eclipse. Sometimes, my Eclipse does not generate this file, so I have to find many solutions to solve it. On Android Studio, we can easily deal with this problem (this problem almost occurs due to define resource).

  • If you familiar with Shortcuts (combination key) on Eclipse (Mac OS or Windows,...) you can configure to get this on Android Studio: Go to File -> Settings -> KeyMap -> Keymaps dropdown Option. Select from them.

  • But, Android Studio is not always good. Specially, when you work on a big project, which includes many projects (each project will generate a apk file). Android Studio is not possible to open two projects in a single window. New projects can only either be opened in a new window or replace the project in the existing window. Someone talks that Module in Android Studio is same as project on Eclipse and Project in Android Studio is same as workspace on Eclipse. But, I think it is not equivalent.

  • gradle and indexing process on Android Studio is so heavy for wooden PC (just like laptop core-i5 + RAM 4GB + HDD sata), it will result in showing Android Studio is not responding

Robust
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  • I didnt get it , you mean to say eclipse does not have it ? – Utsav Gupta Feb 03 '16 at 08:20
  • Oh, In Android Studio, the preview feature can help you code your layout and watch the mock up without switch to "Design Mode" – Robust Feb 07 '16 at 10:33
  • Until 2014 Eclipse was used for 99% of all apps. Suddenly the big company Google start to tell people to use Android Studio... so we changed our business and lost several projects. Very unstable, unreliable, very slow, difficult to use, cannot convert projects... I think for new projects, people should decide themselves what to use: Google AS or Eclipse, Both can crash, both are slow, both are not perfect, but Eclipse has our preference for now. Google should focus on the Waymo and Google platform. – Bart Mensfort May 27 '17 at 13:38
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Eclipse is far more superior to AS. It is much easier to use, more intuitive, much less buggy (even though alot buggier than VISUAL Studio, but we're comparing to AS), and will probably make your work more productive. It's 2016 now and I'm planning to keep using Eclipse as long as it's possible.

JJ Ab
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I am new and I started with AS, but soon grew frustrated when it came down to using other developers repositories in my project. The whole aggrevating process and guesswork of migrating them over to the gradle and configuring manually just became over bearing to me, so I went retroactive and downloaded Mars1 and gave it a try. I found it to be a little unintuitive at first, but once it I learned the navigation I fell in love with the openness of it.. I still intend to use Android Studio for all or my releases, but eclipse is now my goto ide right now unless Google tries making some API that is only used in Studio. I like options and hate it when companies try to streamline they lose great experienced developers that way. Also @mistersmith...you probably cannot afford to be that naive. You are going to go the way of the dodo thinking their is only one solution and feeding into corporate garbage. You may not know it, but google is grooming people like you into believing AS is the only practical solution. Just wait until you are forced to migrate to something differnent in the future after buying into AS for all of your mobile application needs.

Robert5185
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There's a question already here which answer this perfectly.

To add my bits, Android Studio is the one which is getting the latest update and is going to be the only official IDE for the future, so I think everyone should move to Android Studio. Android Studio is far better, stable and lightweight IDE. Eclipse has been crashing on me since I started Android Development, while Android Studio had a lot less crashing. On top of that we have a very good integration of Maven for libraries in Android Studio.

The future is here with Gradle, ANT is a thing of past.

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0xC0DED00D
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Here are some thoughts about how Android Studio team has not been able to become a product of a lot better than Eclipse and why, in my opinion, Google Android Studio will close the project in the near future due to some chronic problems: http://turbocolour.blogspot.com/p/eclipse-adt-vs-android-studio.html

user075
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Interesting topic for me: I used to think that Eclipse was a hell of IDE for building Android apps... ironically, now that I am using AS things got worst. For sure AS is much more integrated with the android platform but that is why I would have expected something smoother and hassle free: Eclipse had the excuse of being a general purpose IDE after all. I think the problem lies in the android architecture itself and the related dev tools that makes coding awkward, unpleasant with much lower throughput compared to other more stable platforms.
Google seems not to care too much about changing API and forcing project/code upgrades to make possible to update projects written for previous versions. They seem to not care at all about backward compatibility. They introduce changes their libs, even stripping away entire APIs from the core (apache for instance in Android 6), think about play services (that is becoming now bigger than the OS itself), admob, analytics....they keep on changing and changing forcing to upgrade / change source / re deploy. Every time I see a popup in the dev console about a new feature I feel shivers down my spine. What about the fact they discontinued eclipse while their studio was still unstable and most important not giving decent reliable tools for porting projects ? Have you guys tried to port a big old project into AS ? It’s a kind of hell... I just think they don't care that much about coders cause we ARE A LOT, We do not pay them and want it or not you will have to conform if you want to stay in. I cannot even think about for example Microsoft or Apple doing the same with their dev tools, but it is also true that in such cases you pay them. My opinion of course.

@Eugene

The reason you say this is the same reason aged developers end up without jobs.

Hey kid, RESPECT. Have a look to what the previous generations of coders did for the IT and what your one is doing and then think about what you write. Just give you some names to start your homework: Stallman Knuth Torvalds Berners Lee Wozniak Ritchie Codd Thomson Engelbart and I could continue ....

Draken
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JoeSpin
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I tried android studio(AS) and it makes your computer very very slow. I have a intel I5 core processor but it takes a lifetime to open AS. I tried to code a little and i see that auto-completion is great in AS. I tried to search the internet how to make AS fast so try it a little more. There are bunch of tutorials that say it can make the AS fast including disabling other programs. With all the hardwork you have to input just to make AS fast, i switched back to Eclipse. Eclipse is a lot lot lot faster than AS. Installing AS just wasted one day of my life.

Glenn de Ramos
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  • But somehow, google is insisting to force everyone on AS since they already halted the ADT Plug-in for Eclipse in their site. – Glenn de Ramos Mar 30 '16 at 11:31
  • "auto-completion is great in AS" nope ,because last time i checked AS is case sensitive in that matter while eclipse is not. – Flying Monkey Jun 07 '16 at 10:46
  • Replace your spinning disc with an ssd and the problem will be solved. I use an i7 with pure ssd storage and AS opens in max 5 seconds – gal Jul 22 '16 at 09:03
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As of May 2015, Android Studio support for NDK has significantly improved. You can choose between automatic native lib generation, or using your own Android.mk in more complex cases. But AS still does not provide a way to debug native parts of an app (if you are using JNI). This may be the last reason to keep Eclipse on one's desktop.

Update, a year later: Android Studio 2.2.1 provides decent NDK support, and is almost fully compatible with the old Android.mk - based configuration. And it does support C++ debug, much easier than Eclipse ever did.

Community
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Alex Cohn
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    There are plenty of reasons to use eclipse over AS.The only reason i will ever use AS is because google is now forcing us to,which is not a very noble deed on there part. – Flying Monkey Jun 07 '16 at 10:49
  • Thanks for drawing my attention: my whole answer is obsolete now! – Alex Cohn Jun 07 '16 at 11:47
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The main Pro now is one has to use it for Android dev. The main con is many other tools still use Eclipse. Even Appium automated test framework for Android.

Nowadays one must use Android Studio. It has great features such as code search: one can context click on 

Find Usages

when a class is highlighted and find uses in the code. (nevermind the word "usages" is incorrect English. :-) It's the Google way. Swim with it.

It has some tighter integration than was accomplished with Eclipsed such as the nice feature to context menu on an xml layout file and find where in code it is used. Useful.

Also, it uses Gradle so people can write their own build processes rather than having an IDE do it automatically. I think this frees Google from having to waste time figuring out how to make the IDE handle all the configuration mess.

While our build went from 2+ minutes with AS 1.x to 17 minutes with AS 2.x, this could be attributable to how we have our Gradle files laid out. We need a build programmer to make sure our build configuration is correct.

As you can see, the main Pro is one has to use it and the putative Pros are it has better support for Android code navigation and screen designers. The main Con is it moves from the standard IDE used for most all other Java development and it doesn't provide drastic improvements in performance. Another Con is it arguably introduces the need for a new role of build engineer; but many projects already were bogged down into manual build definitions with Maven; so, that may not be a Con depending on your team's speed.

UB Mobile Banking
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For Android development definitely Android Studio is better than Eclipse. I have worked on Eclipse for almost 4 years but when I switched to Android Studio, I felt the difference. Below are few points I have noticed:

Performance: Android Studio's performance is better than Eclipse and improving with each new release.

Intelligent: Android Studio is more intelligent than Eclipse. It gives you suggestions more accurate and fast

More options: You can build multi flavor APKs at once in build.gradle

Summary: After working on Android Studio if you will work on Eclipse you will feel the same as driving a entry level car of Toyota after driving Lamborghini Aventador :) I felt this difference

Update:

Android Studio 2.0 is coming. Its very very fast than current Android Studio. http://android-developers.blogspot.jp/2015/11/android-studio-20-preview.html

Update:

Android Studio 3.0 is released. As I mentioned 2 years ago about the difference, Android Studio is getting better day by day. Have a look into AS 3.0 : https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/10/android-studio-30.html

Update:

Android Studio 3.3 has been released last month. Please check here for more details: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/01/android-studio-33.html

Vikasdeep Singh
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    You gotta be kidding. AS may be better in many aspects but not in performance. Try to compile and run a small-sized project in eclipse and do the same with AS. In eclipse it is just 10s. In AS it can be 30s to 1 min. – Mister Smith Oct 29 '15 at 18:57
  • @MisterSmith, JFYI: here is AS 2.0 coming. Eclipse can not beat it. Check this link: http://android-developers.blogspot.jp/2015/11/android-studio-20-preview.html – Vikasdeep Singh Dec 17 '15 at 02:27
  • Who gives money for hyping AS? and how much? please let me know,i am in need of money. – Flying Monkey Jun 07 '16 at 10:44
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    I absolutely do not agree with the "Intelligent" point. Yes, Android Studio thinks it has to think on behalf the developer, which eats a lot of performance and it's in most cases simply overkill. Seriously, Google please add something like an "expert mode" and stop feeding experienced developers with information that we all know already. Also a good example is the coding outline. Who decided that the outline gets sorted in some weird way by default? Just don't touch the outline and let the developers choose. – gal Jul 22 '16 at 08:56
  • The build system as mentioned in "more options" is definitely a masterpiece. You could of course also do the same in Eclipse with gradle, but in AS, you get it out of the box, and it works. I build 16 release apks with one single mouse click. That is a huge improvement in AS! – gal Jul 22 '16 at 09:01