9 ms·

Android Studio 2.0 Is Google’s New, Improved Development Suite

78 points by rafa2000 10y ago

butz 10y ago
And it is still slower than good old Eclipse.
- josteink 10y ago
  Much better to use though. Eclipse just feels like drowning, if you're not already into it. Android studio lets you pull out what you need, when you need it and doesn't just throw everything in your face like eclipse (and there's a lot it it there!) either you need it or not. I'm guessing there's a reason Google decided to obsolete their eclipse-based Android SDK tools.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago
  Yeah I just started dabbling with it and I have an ultra fast windows 10 laptop with solid state drive and I'm amazed at how long it takes to go from changing a line of code to running it in the emulator. I was originally planning to do dev work for android in a virtual machine like everything else I work on but I doubt it would be anywhere near performant enough.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    If you wanna feel something rare, find a win98 box on a pentium 2/3 and run turbo pascal IDE. Enjoy the paradoxical bliss. ps: TURBO.EXE amounts to a whopping 600KB.
    - ansgri 10y ago
      Or if you're into something more modern, Delphi 7 will do. And it'll probably run on modern Windows.
      - agumonkey 10y ago
        I can't decide which I prefer, the charm of text mode(TP7.0 was really pretty and nice) or the look'n'feel of early windows GUIs (Windows 3 / OS2 warp beveled boxes and pale hues are so nice).
    - kabdib 10y ago
      LightSpeed C: modify-to-run in a couple of seconds (often). I worked on an assembler/editor that had a change-to-run system on the order of a couple of seconds, too. Something changes when you have near instant turnaround time. It's magic. Some of the most miserable time I've spent has on projects with tooling where builds took hours, and often hours just to fail. I was even okay with 30 minute turnaround time, as long as it was clear that the bottleneck wasn't fucking lame tools: The need to burn a bunch of EPROMs for each build, for instance . . . though I fixed that as soon as I could.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      MS-DOS 3.3, Turbo Pascal 6.0 and TASM, all in a 1.44 floppy! :)
      - agumonkey 10y ago
        I have a weird fetish of making everything fit on a floppy. Acute Kaytosis I guess. If I had functionning floppies I'd prep a DOS3 one like yours :)
- hadrien01 10y ago
  Hmm... no? I find Android Studio way faster in daily usage compared to Eclipse, and above all it's way more refined: I don't have to "clean" my project twice an hour, and dependencies management and writing is much easier.
  - Aaargh20318 10y ago
    Android Studio slows down my whole machine to a crawl even if it's just running in the background doing nothing. I throw piles of stuff at my machine without a slowdown (see my other post) and the only thing that manages to kill any and all performance is Android Studio. Eclipse runs like a dream in comparison.
- 0xFFC 10y ago
  Not just slower , it does not fit to native look and feel, You are not going to believe me how much time I spent for fixing ridiculous font rendering for Android Studio, at the end I just gave up (in Ubuntu. I tried all kind of patches, TuxJdk, changing arguments for OpenJdk, OracleJdk , changing fontconfig, using infinality and anything you can imagine. nothing works). Right now I am switching to Xamarin,Perfect support from Microsoft (because it is important strategic product for Microsoft. I remember one year ago I predict Microsoft will buy xamarin and open source it).Bash is coming to Windows and lets be honest , none of java's IDEs can compete with Visual Studio. and one of the worst thing about google is they don't deliverer feature they promise. I did a lot of NDK development. I use emacs for that , but eclipse was acceptable too. But I remember last year they promised full NDK support in android studio, but they haven't introduced it yet. This is what absolutely I will not tolerate from a company. If it is not ready , then don't introduce it in development conference , if it is ready why it took so long (1 year ??? and still no news). another point about Google is they don't absolutely care about developers. Who are we kidding ? no one can deny for years developer begged google for new,faster,better Android emulator. But they did nothing. Right after Microsoft introduced their Hyper-V based android emulator which is fast as hell, They developed new virtual machine. (they use qt5 for its interface). Because they felt threatened by Microsoft.I promise if it wasn't for that the old emulator was still there.
  - HillaryBriss 10y ago
    Yeah. There's something to be said for having a highly developed intelligence for building great IDEs and libraries at the _organization level_ rather than just at the individual programmer level. Despite its reputation for hiring the very best programmers in the world, Google's ability to create a really great developer toolchain for Android didn't measure up to what Microsoft has been doing for decades. It seems like Google has tried to pursue a cheap shortcut to IDE greatness, at first by building a plugin for Eclipse, and then, by putting some money into a relationship with IntelliJ and Gradle (who truly are excellent at what they do). But still, Google has not brought the excellence of organization and deep commitment fully in-house.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
- tartuffe78 10y ago
  Not my experience on OS X.
  - HillaryBriss 10y ago
    Android development was invented by Google to convert programmers who use Windows into programmers who use OS X.
- jsight 10y ago
  Speed is kind of a funny thing with IDEs. All of my typical workflows are faster in Intellij than they were in Eclipse. YMMV if you are hitting different features than I am.
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  In theory, the new "instant run" feature addresses some of the "clean, build, deploy, run" pain. http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/instant-run http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/instant-run In practice, what I've seen so far is that sometimes I'm not sure what is being "instantly run" -- my latest code change or something older. Still trying to gain confidence in that feature (or just not use it because I don't understand what it's deploying all the time).
  - airless_cotton 10y ago
    Did you give https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android-protify https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android-protify a try? It exists longer than Google's "Instant Run", is faster and works without flaws (in my experience).
    - HillaryBriss 10y ago
      Thanks. Will definitely look into it.
- guelo 10y ago
  I don't think it's the IDE, it's the build system. When Google pushed everyone over to Android Studio they also pushed everyone from Ant to Gradle. Gradle is supposed to be a better Maven but it's just dog slow. Just typing gradle --help takes over 3 seconds on my Macbook Pro.
  - airless_cotton 10y ago
    Migrating to sbt-android has been a revelation coming from Gradle. It's bizarre that a one-man-team beats the mighty Google in pretty much everything. The build is so freaking fast that it runs ProGuard by default – and beats a Gradle build without ProGuard. That dev implemented and shipped Instant Run way before Google "invented" it, and it's still faster compared to Google's implementation.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      I really don't get their hype around Gradle, if it wasn't for it, most likely no one would care about Groovy any more. Since my focus is the NDK, which keeps being half-done in Gradle, I keep using Ant + ndk-build and have migrated to Visual Studio 2015 for my Android hobby coding.
      - airless_cotton 10y ago
        As far as I know, sbt-android just recently got even more support/features for NDK (on top of the existing support): The plugin can now manage and auto-install SDKs, tools, support repos and NDKs, so no messing around with Google's `android` tool anymore! Maybe this is of use to you. https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/7b32e55f340638fa5f2cda5817900ea1446456e3 https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/7b32e55f... https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/53b855de4d2a51b6fbf9358e87a511dca8d933b9 https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/53b855de...
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Thanks!
- virmundi 10y ago
  I know you're getting down voted, but I agree. In my experience, in both Windows VMs and on OS X, Intellij is just slow. From the VM side, Eclipse compiled quick, Tomcat restarted great, JUnits flew. To be fair this was pretty straight forward Spring MVC/Services, no web plugins for HTML5 stuff. Intellij for Web Development (Gulp, and AngularJS support) was just terrible. The UI would be unresponsive. It could take multiple seconds for the File menus to pull up. Builds are slow. Hot deploy wasn't much better than in Eclipse. On OS X, there's a typing lag. I could live with that. My big issue here is that Eclipse gets better battery life. There is a known bug in Intellij that forces OS X to keep the high performance graphics card on. Battery goes from 5 hrs to 2.5. This makes getting out of the house untenable. I use Android Studio because that's the guidance, but I prefer to not use Intellij if I can.
  - devsquid 10y ago
    from my exp on Mac. Intellij is the fastest IDE. Sure beats the shit out of Xcode.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Not only it is slower and takes piles of RAM, it still doesn't support the NDK properly, which keeps being experimental and lacks the majority of features that Eclipse CDT and ndk-build have. Eclipse CDT with Ant + ndk-build finish a build before Gradle manages to parse all its configuration files.
dkopi 10y ago
Long time eclipse user, impossible to go back after using android studio. It feels like programming with one hand tied behind my back.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I doubt you have tried Android Studio support for NDK versus Eclipse CDT.
  - dkopi 10y ago
    Your assumptions are incorrect, and rather offensive.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      So you are highly offended that I assumed you never used the NDK!?! A programming tool. Ad hominem reaches a new level.
    - warcher 10y ago
      Uhh, have you? Cause man, I'll tell you straight up, I despise Eclipse. To the marrow of my bones. But if you wanna do native debugging, they're it. Native debugging is very important when you're getting nasty (and if you're not getting nasty, for the love of god why would you use the NDK?!).
- beefsack 10y ago
  I'm always surprised at how many people willingly put up with Eclipse's clunkiness and performance problems, regardless of how many functions it provides.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Because most of the time we don't have a choice. At work, I am yet to get a customer that allows us to use anything but Eclipse. At home I rather use Netbeans for Java projects. For Android, the Android Studio barely supports the NDK. So we are left with the older Eclipse CDT plugins, Visual Studio or NVidia CodeWorks.
moflome 10y ago
Maybe this is better left as a comment SO, but we have been unable to any recent version of Android Studio for our development team for the past four months because we use a mapFragment in our app. It's a known error [0] in the Maps API v2. I understand the complexity Google is facing, but I can't imagine Apple not addressing such a fundamental UI capability in their dev tools. Frustrating. [0] https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=9021 https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=...
- eco 10y ago
  For several months XCode would just crash when I tried to run my application with debugging. It was eventually fixed by an XCode update. I think the only large platform owning company that has really succeeded with development tools is Microsoft. With Microsoft's newfound interest in cross platform development I'm looking forward to the day when I can just develop entirely in Visual Studio.
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    > With Microsoft's newfound interest in cross platform development I'm looking forward to the day when I can just develop entirely in Visual Studio. Agreed, VS is the best IDE out there by far. Still a shame that developing in VS implies developing on Windows.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Some of us are developers and do actually like Windows, but I agree it would nice for it to be cross-platform. It would be handy on my travel netbook, which is the only GNU/Linux device at home.
    - mixedCase 10y ago
      How is it better than any of JetBrain's products? Fairly limited without ReSharper, which makes it slow; language support is not particularly great; updates have made me lose half a day's producitvity (although that's par for the course for Windows); weird keybinds... And of course: Windows-only, not open source and not free as in free beer either if you don't meet certain criteria.
retox 10y ago
Move fast, break all the tutorials. Android has a problem with churn in tooling.
- aswanson 10y ago
  Ive noticed this across the board with google with regard to developers. They half-ass everything programmers need to interface and use what they produce. Very frustrating.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Try to find documentation as well, most of the time it is scattered around developer blogs, SO posts or devbytes videos instead of being posted on the Android documentation website.
- dave2000 10y ago
  Give me increased functionality over ease of finding tutorials any day.
wired_devil 10y ago
So, how to enable material design?
swiley 10y ago
What's wrong with a sane makefile oriented thing with a small tool chain and letting the user pick the editor/IDE? Why does every large company build out this ridiculous IDE for their product?
- lallysingh 10y ago
  I usually use the command line for Android work, with emacs. But people demand IDEs these days. So here we are.
  - ajford 10y ago
    Any chance you feel up to sharing? I've been wanting to get into Android dev work, but I'm staunchly a CLI guy, and I've had a hard time trying to figure out the IDEs Google keeps pushing out. Not to mention the obscene sizes of these damn IDEs.
    - lallysingh 10y ago
      I don't have any tricks to share. Just build the app with the command-line tool, and the included android.el will do the debugging integration for you.
    - ojiikun 10y ago
      most Android projects these days use gradle. install it via your favourite package manager, and if the project is well-configured a simple 'gradle build' will do the trick. at the worst you might need to download the latest Android SDK, point some environment vars, and do a basic fetch of the most recent build tools. android is rather cli friendly - a full 50% of the devs I know use vim or emacs.
- warcher 10y ago
  Dat debugger doe.
homero 10y ago
Why's it so hard just to get adb these days? My adb requires like 5gb of other stuff
Hexigonz 10y ago
I need to upgrade, the amount of random steps I had to take to make the old AS even remotely manageable was a headache.
steaminghacker 10y ago
I switched to Studio 2.0 hoping for better NDK support over 1.5. However, it appears to still require the experimental Gradle plug-in. Which, frankly, isn't very good. I'm still building my native .so separately using NDK build. I don't get any native code debugging either. Is there something obvious I'm missing?
mattezell 10y ago
Does anyone ever actually experience greater emulator performance under Windows? Each time an update is pushed, I am excited to always see "XX faster emulator" listed as an improvement - but never do I see a notable improvement... So far, the only usable "emulator" that I've found is actually virtualization using Xamarin's Android Player...

78 points by rafa2000 10y ago

butz 10y ago

And it is still slower than good old Eclipse.

josteink 10y ago
Much better to use though. Eclipse just feels like drowning, if you're not already into it. Android studio lets you pull out what you need, when you need it and doesn't just throw everything in your face like eclipse (and there's a lot it it there!) either you need it or not. I'm guessing there's a reason Google decided to obsolete their eclipse-based Android SDK tools.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago
Yeah I just started dabbling with it and I have an ultra fast windows 10 laptop with solid state drive and I'm amazed at how long it takes to go from changing a line of code to running it in the emulator. I was originally planning to do dev work for android in a virtual machine like everything else I work on but I doubt it would be anywhere near performant enough.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- agumonkey 10y ago
  If you wanna feel something rare, find a win98 box on a pentium 2/3 and run turbo pascal IDE. Enjoy the paradoxical bliss. ps: TURBO.EXE amounts to a whopping 600KB.
  - ansgri 10y ago
    Or if you're into something more modern, Delphi 7 will do. And it'll probably run on modern Windows.
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      I can't decide which I prefer, the charm of text mode(TP7.0 was really pretty and nice) or the look'n'feel of early windows GUIs (Windows 3 / OS2 warp beveled boxes and pale hues are so nice).
  - kabdib 10y ago
    LightSpeed C: modify-to-run in a couple of seconds (often). I worked on an assembler/editor that had a change-to-run system on the order of a couple of seconds, too. Something changes when you have near instant turnaround time. It's magic. Some of the most miserable time I've spent has on projects with tooling where builds took hours, and often hours just to fail. I was even okay with 30 minute turnaround time, as long as it was clear that the bottleneck wasn't fucking lame tools: The need to burn a bunch of EPROMs for each build, for instance . . . though I fixed that as soon as I could.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    MS-DOS 3.3, Turbo Pascal 6.0 and TASM, all in a 1.44 floppy! :)
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      I have a weird fetish of making everything fit on a floppy. Acute Kaytosis I guess. If I had functionning floppies I'd prep a DOS3 one like yours :)
hadrien01 10y ago
Hmm... no? I find Android Studio way faster in daily usage compared to Eclipse, and above all it's way more refined: I don't have to "clean" my project twice an hour, and dependencies management and writing is much easier.
- Aaargh20318 10y ago
  Android Studio slows down my whole machine to a crawl even if it's just running in the background doing nothing. I throw piles of stuff at my machine without a slowdown (see my other post) and the only thing that manages to kill any and all performance is Android Studio. Eclipse runs like a dream in comparison.
0xFFC 10y ago
Not just slower , it does not fit to native look and feel, You are not going to believe me how much time I spent for fixing ridiculous font rendering for Android Studio, at the end I just gave up (in Ubuntu. I tried all kind of patches, TuxJdk, changing arguments for OpenJdk, OracleJdk , changing fontconfig, using infinality and anything you can imagine. nothing works). Right now I am switching to Xamarin,Perfect support from Microsoft (because it is important strategic product for Microsoft. I remember one year ago I predict Microsoft will buy xamarin and open source it).Bash is coming to Windows and lets be honest , none of java's IDEs can compete with Visual Studio. and one of the worst thing about google is they don't deliverer feature they promise. I did a lot of NDK development. I use emacs for that , but eclipse was acceptable too. But I remember last year they promised full NDK support in android studio, but they haven't introduced it yet. This is what absolutely I will not tolerate from a company. If it is not ready , then don't introduce it in development conference , if it is ready why it took so long (1 year ??? and still no news). another point about Google is they don't absolutely care about developers. Who are we kidding ? no one can deny for years developer begged google for new,faster,better Android emulator. But they did nothing. Right after Microsoft introduced their Hyper-V based android emulator which is fast as hell, They developed new virtual machine. (they use qt5 for its interface). Because they felt threatened by Microsoft.I promise if it wasn't for that the old emulator was still there.
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  Yeah. There's something to be said for having a highly developed intelligence for building great IDEs and libraries at the _organization level_ rather than just at the individual programmer level. Despite its reputation for hiring the very best programmers in the world, Google's ability to create a really great developer toolchain for Android didn't measure up to what Microsoft has been doing for decades. It seems like Google has tried to pursue a cheap shortcut to IDE greatness, at first by building a plugin for Eclipse, and then, by putting some money into a relationship with IntelliJ and Gradle (who truly are excellent at what they do). But still, Google has not brought the excellence of organization and deep commitment fully in-house.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
tartuffe78 10y ago
Not my experience on OS X.
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  Android development was invented by Google to convert programmers who use Windows into programmers who use OS X.
jsight 10y ago
Speed is kind of a funny thing with IDEs. All of my typical workflows are faster in Intellij than they were in Eclipse. YMMV if you are hitting different features than I am.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
In theory, the new "instant run" feature addresses some of the "clean, build, deploy, run" pain. http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/instant-run http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/instant-run In practice, what I've seen so far is that sometimes I'm not sure what is being "instantly run" -- my latest code change or something older. Still trying to gain confidence in that feature (or just not use it because I don't understand what it's deploying all the time).
- airless_cotton 10y ago
  Did you give https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android-protify https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android-protify a try? It exists longer than Google's "Instant Run", is faster and works without flaws (in my experience).
  - HillaryBriss 10y ago
    Thanks. Will definitely look into it.
guelo 10y ago
I don't think it's the IDE, it's the build system. When Google pushed everyone over to Android Studio they also pushed everyone from Ant to Gradle. Gradle is supposed to be a better Maven but it's just dog slow. Just typing gradle --help takes over 3 seconds on my Macbook Pro.
- airless_cotton 10y ago
  Migrating to sbt-android has been a revelation coming from Gradle. It's bizarre that a one-man-team beats the mighty Google in pretty much everything. The build is so freaking fast that it runs ProGuard by default – and beats a Gradle build without ProGuard. That dev implemented and shipped Instant Run way before Google "invented" it, and it's still faster compared to Google's implementation.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    I really don't get their hype around Gradle, if it wasn't for it, most likely no one would care about Groovy any more. Since my focus is the NDK, which keeps being half-done in Gradle, I keep using Ant + ndk-build and have migrated to Visual Studio 2015 for my Android hobby coding.
    - airless_cotton 10y ago
      As far as I know, sbt-android just recently got even more support/features for NDK (on top of the existing support): The plugin can now manage and auto-install SDKs, tools, support repos and NDKs, so no messing around with Google's `android` tool anymore! Maybe this is of use to you. https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/7b32e55f340638fa5f2cda5817900ea1446456e3 https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/7b32e55f... https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/53b855de4d2a51b6fbf9358e87a511dca8d933b9 https://github.com/scala-android/sbt-android/commit/53b855de...
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Thanks!
virmundi 10y ago
I know you're getting down voted, but I agree. In my experience, in both Windows VMs and on OS X, Intellij is just slow. From the VM side, Eclipse compiled quick, Tomcat restarted great, JUnits flew. To be fair this was pretty straight forward Spring MVC/Services, no web plugins for HTML5 stuff. Intellij for Web Development (Gulp, and AngularJS support) was just terrible. The UI would be unresponsive. It could take multiple seconds for the File menus to pull up. Builds are slow. Hot deploy wasn't much better than in Eclipse. On OS X, there's a typing lag. I could live with that. My big issue here is that Eclipse gets better battery life. There is a known bug in Intellij that forces OS X to keep the high performance graphics card on. Battery goes from 5 hrs to 2.5. This makes getting out of the house untenable. I use Android Studio because that's the guidance, but I prefer to not use Intellij if I can.
- devsquid 10y ago
  from my exp on Mac. Intellij is the fastest IDE. Sure beats the shit out of Xcode.
pjmlp 10y ago
Not only it is slower and takes piles of RAM, it still doesn't support the NDK properly, which keeps being experimental and lacks the majority of features that Eclipse CDT and ndk-build have. Eclipse CDT with Ant + ndk-build finish a build before Gradle manages to parse all its configuration files.

dkopi 10y ago

Long time eclipse user, impossible to go back after using android studio. It feels like programming with one hand tied behind my back.

pjmlp 10y ago
I doubt you have tried Android Studio support for NDK versus Eclipse CDT.
- dkopi 10y ago
  Your assumptions are incorrect, and rather offensive.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    So you are highly offended that I assumed you never used the NDK!?! A programming tool. Ad hominem reaches a new level.
  - warcher 10y ago
    Uhh, have you? Cause man, I'll tell you straight up, I despise Eclipse. To the marrow of my bones. But if you wanna do native debugging, they're it. Native debugging is very important when you're getting nasty (and if you're not getting nasty, for the love of god why would you use the NDK?!).
beefsack 10y ago
I'm always surprised at how many people willingly put up with Eclipse's clunkiness and performance problems, regardless of how many functions it provides.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Because most of the time we don't have a choice. At work, I am yet to get a customer that allows us to use anything but Eclipse. At home I rather use Netbeans for Java projects. For Android, the Android Studio barely supports the NDK. So we are left with the older Eclipse CDT plugins, Visual Studio or NVidia CodeWorks.

moflome 10y ago

Maybe this is better left as a comment SO, but we have been unable to any recent version of Android Studio for our development team for the past four months because we use a mapFragment in our app. It's a known error [0] in the Maps API v2. I understand the complexity Google is facing, but I can't imagine Apple not addressing such a fundamental UI capability in their dev tools. Frustrating. [0] https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=9021 https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=...

eco 10y ago
For several months XCode would just crash when I tried to run my application with debugging. It was eventually fixed by an XCode update. I think the only large platform owning company that has really succeeded with development tools is Microsoft. With Microsoft's newfound interest in cross platform development I'm looking forward to the day when I can just develop entirely in Visual Studio.
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  > With Microsoft's newfound interest in cross platform development I'm looking forward to the day when I can just develop entirely in Visual Studio. Agreed, VS is the best IDE out there by far. Still a shame that developing in VS implies developing on Windows.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Some of us are developers and do actually like Windows, but I agree it would nice for it to be cross-platform. It would be handy on my travel netbook, which is the only GNU/Linux device at home.
  - mixedCase 10y ago
    How is it better than any of JetBrain's products? Fairly limited without ReSharper, which makes it slow; language support is not particularly great; updates have made me lose half a day's producitvity (although that's par for the course for Windows); weird keybinds... And of course: Windows-only, not open source and not free as in free beer either if you don't meet certain criteria.

retox 10y ago

Move fast, break all the tutorials. Android has a problem with churn in tooling.

aswanson 10y ago
Ive noticed this across the board with google with regard to developers. They half-ass everything programmers need to interface and use what they produce. Very frustrating.
pjmlp 10y ago
Try to find documentation as well, most of the time it is scattered around developer blogs, SO posts or devbytes videos instead of being posted on the Android documentation website.
dave2000 10y ago
Give me increased functionality over ease of finding tutorials any day.

wired_devil 10y ago

So, how to enable material design?

swiley 10y ago

What's wrong with a sane makefile oriented thing with a small tool chain and letting the user pick the editor/IDE? Why does every large company build out this ridiculous IDE for their product?

lallysingh 10y ago
I usually use the command line for Android work, with emacs. But people demand IDEs these days. So here we are.
- ajford 10y ago
  Any chance you feel up to sharing? I've been wanting to get into Android dev work, but I'm staunchly a CLI guy, and I've had a hard time trying to figure out the IDEs Google keeps pushing out. Not to mention the obscene sizes of these damn IDEs.
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    I don't have any tricks to share. Just build the app with the command-line tool, and the included android.el will do the debugging integration for you.
  - ojiikun 10y ago
    most Android projects these days use gradle. install it via your favourite package manager, and if the project is well-configured a simple 'gradle build' will do the trick. at the worst you might need to download the latest Android SDK, point some environment vars, and do a basic fetch of the most recent build tools. android is rather cli friendly - a full 50% of the devs I know use vim or emacs.
warcher 10y ago
Dat debugger doe.

homero 10y ago

Why's it so hard just to get adb these days? My adb requires like 5gb of other stuff

Hexigonz 10y ago

I need to upgrade, the amount of random steps I had to take to make the old AS even remotely manageable was a headache.

steaminghacker 10y ago

I switched to Studio 2.0 hoping for better NDK support over 1.5. However, it appears to still require the experimental Gradle plug-in. Which, frankly, isn't very good. I'm still building my native .so separately using NDK build. I don't get any native code debugging either. Is there something obvious I'm missing?

mattezell 10y ago

Does anyone ever actually experience greater emulator performance under Windows? Each time an update is pushed, I am excited to always see "XX faster emulator" listed as an improvement - but never do I see a notable improvement... So far, the only usable "emulator" that I've found is actually virtualization using Xamarin's Android Player...