Another Defection to Android Studio

Like many other developers out there, I have been using Eclipse as my main IDE for many years now. However for Android development I have decided to take the plunge and migrate to Android Studio (especially since it has finally been released).

Here is a blog post I found that closely echoes what I have long thought regarding the issues with Eclipse:

http://engineering.meetme.com/2014/02/a-tale-of-migrating-from-eclipse-to-android-studio/

Build, build, build

For me, another reason was that the Ant build files I was using to handle building different versions (free vs paid, dev vs release, etc) were getting too complicated to manage easily. So I can now change over to Gradle at the same time, since that’s what Android Studio uses by default.

Gradle has the concept of build variants to handle building different versions of an Android app.

The Recurring Eclipse Re-install

Here are some other problems that I personally have had with using Eclipse.

  • Plugins, well not the plugins themselves, but having too many plugins. I’ve found that having lots of plugins in one Eclipse installation can cause Eclipse to misbehave , especially after several updates. There are several ways I use to get around this:
    • Keep separate Eclipse installations for different types of development, e.g one for Java, one for Android, one for Cloud, etc. Therefore each installation will only have a few plugins relevant to the type of development. However this is not always convenient if a project does require multiple types of development.
    • Every so often, when Eclipse starts to play up, do a fresh re-install of Eclipse (along with the latest version of the plugins required).
  • Intermittent miscellaneous bugs, e.g. cut and paste stops working, builds not alway done automatically, etc. A lot of these issues are more of a nuisance rather than being a serious problem, but all the same it tends to kill your productivity (and isn’t that why we use IDE’s in the first place?).

No Pain, No …

Make no mistake, despite what the Android Studio documentation might try to tell you, migrating a non-trivial project will take some time and probably involve some pain. But worth the effort I think.