As someone who rarely does Android development (but does a little bit here and there) I agree that Android Studio can feel heavy when you're barely using any of

As someone who rarely does Android development (but does a little bit here and there) I agree that Android Studio can feel heavy when you're barely using any of the features. And the quantity and depth of menus you almost never use can seem Byzantine. Conversely, it's also surprisingly easy to just install and run with, though it does take time to download all the components and the first Gradle build can take a while if your machine is older. The first time I used it I was shocked at how painless it was to get going (I came into it expecting it to be an endless nightmare of configuration and headaches a la Eclipse). I continue to use it occasionally and without trouble on a more than three year old Inspiron 3000 with only 4 GB of RAM and a cpumark score around 1700. (Of course I'm also not really using the emulator on that machine and just debugging on an actual device.) I've also almost never used the visual layout editor (after seeing that is existed) just because the layout system reminded me of flexbox and CSS, so I felt comfortable just writing layouts. So maybe it's bad, but I've also never felt like I needed it. Could it be better? Probably. Is it completely terrible? Not really.