Google releases Android Studio, kills off Eclipse ADT plugin

Google announced on Tuesday that after two years of work, it is finally ready to release its IntelliJ-based integrated development environment (IDE), Android Studio, to the wider world with its 1.0 release.

While Android Studio will generally offer a better experience for Android developers than the traditional Eclipse development used, the kicker for developers wedded to Eclipse is the discontinuation of the Android Developer Tools (ADT) plugin for Eclipse that integrates a number of Android tools into the IDE.

"The ADT plugin for Eclipse is no longer in active development," Google's developer website said. "If you're currently using it, you should migrate to Android Studio as soon as possible."

While the abandonment of ADT is a questionable state of affairs for Eclipse aficionados, in my opinion, compared to Eclipse, Android Studio will offer developers a Gradle build environment and an improved user interface designer, as well as a better memory monitor and improved string translation editor. As always with these recommendations, your mileage may vary.

When Android Studio was unveiled in May last year, I wrote on TechRepublic: "Eclipse may try, but it cannot keep up with Visual Studio, or even XCode. The Eclipse Foundation, which includes Google, has had well over a decade to make Eclipse a worthy IDE, but it suffers under its own weight."

In the 18 months since, I have seen no reason to change that opinion.

Similar to Chrome, Google will offer Android Studio in four flavours, or development channels: Canary for bleeding-edge weekly updates; Dev for fortnight to monthly updates; Beta channel for what it says on the tin; and the Stable channel, which every user is defaulted to.

Developers can download Android Studio 1.0 now.