What is the best IDE to develop Android apps in? [closed]

Question

LATEST NEWS

Android Studio has officially come out of beta and been released. It is now the official IDE for Android Development - Eclipse won't be supported anymore. It is definitely the IDE of choice for Android Development. Link to download page: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

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NEWS

As of Google I/O 2013, the Android team has moved to IntelliJ Idea with the new Android Studio IDE: http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html

Great to see Google endorse Idea. It is safe to say that Android Studio, and thus Idea, will from now on be the definitive IDE for Android development! :D

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ORIGINAL ANSWER

IntelliJ now has support for Android. See Enabling Android Support from the JetBrains help page and the Google Code project page for the plugin. The Getting Started wiki page is pretty helpful.

If you are used to IntelliJ, I don't think it would be beneficial to switch IDEs just for Android tools. You can work on Android with any text editor (I use Vim). If you're more productive with a specific environment I don't see why you'd have to learn a new one. Not worth it in my opinion. Plus I'm a big IntelliJ fan. The IntelliJ plugin lets you make apk files and push the app to the emulator, that's all you need for Android app development. I'd say you're safe sticking with IntelliJ.

Update: there is now an official free IDE for IntelliJ android dev! http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2010/10/intellij-idea-10-free-ide-for-android-development/

Eclipse is not that hard to learn (I use both Eclipse and NetBeans, and I switch back and forth pretty effortlessly). If you're going to be learning Android development from the start, I can recommend Hello, Android, which I just finished. It shows you exactly how to use all the features of Eclipse that are useful for developing Android apps. There's also a brief section on getting set up to develop from the command line and from other IDEs.

Of the existing IDEs, Ted Neward ranks them this way:

Best: IntelliJ IDEA

Second: Netbeans

Third: Eclipse

He seems to think that Eclipse throws up a lot of "friction"; hard to say what that means.

Edit, years later: After attempting to use Eclipse/Aptana for node development and using JetBrains products for node and ruby development I would absolutely start with IntelliJ IDEA and give that a try for the 30 day trial.

Unfortunately, there is no perfect IDE for Android. Eclipse has more features as it is the only IDE google developed plugin for. However, if you are just like me, tired of crashes and weired debug/develop mode swithes, Use Netbeans plugin from http://nbandroid.kenai.com.

If you do android native code development using NDK, give Visual Studio a try. (Not a typo!!!) Check out: http://ian-ni-lewis.blogspot.com/2011/01/its-like-coming-home-again.html

and: http://code.google.com/p/vs-android/

I think intellij is the best option for android. i have used both eclipse and intellij and found intellij is much easier to use with android as compared to eclipse because of these reasons :-

Intellij provides a built-in support for android and you don't have to configure it as you need to do with eclipse. Intellij gives you auto-lookup feature which is really important for developer like us to increase our productivity. And if we talk about eclipse you have to type each and every method, classname etc on your own. (May be eclipse has this feature too but i never found it and trust me i tried to find it like anything) Its much more user friendly and easy to use than eclipse. I hope it will help you and other members of stack overflow to decide which IDE is best for Android development.

My personal choice is Intellij.

EDIT

But there is one thing i love about eclipse and that is visual layout creator. You can use drag and drop technique to create a layout and eclipse will automatically generate an XML file for you just like XCODE.

EDIT

Good News!! Intellij added a new feature which shows how your app's view is going to look like. It doesn't work exactly like Eclipse but it will give you a good idea about your layout.

My personal choice is still Intellij because it helps me to type faster than eclipse.

EDIT

Ok guys these days i am using eclipse juno and found its kind of buggy and slow. So if you still want to use eclipse better stick to some older version. And finally i am able to found how to enable auto-complete in eclipse. Below is a small tutorial.

Eclipse -> Preference - > Java -> Editor -> Content Assist -> Auto Activation

Now put following in the three given boxes

Auto Activation delay(ms) - 0
Auto activation triggers for java - .(abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Auto activation triggers for javadoc - @#

You are now good to go. Happy coding.

EDIT

As now Google has adopted Intellij for their own Android dev tool, there is no question now about which one is better. Intellij is far far better than eclipse. And i switched back to Intellij and it feels like i am back home!! :D

All of the full-featured Java IDE's are good and share all of the same concepts and main features. If you can find your way around one you can probably do the same for any other without much trouble.

EDIT: Google gave us a wonderful gift with the new and free AndroidStudio is very good. I highly recommend it over Eclipse.