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

Answer 1

One good system is Basic4Android - great for anyone familiar with Basic,

• Includes a visual designer for screen layouts
• Can connect to the emulators available as part of the Android SDK
• Makes it relatively easy to develop programs.

Answer 2

If you haven't installed Eclipse yet, I'd recommend Motorola's MotoDev Studio. It does a lot of the annoying little tasks like set up your Android environment along with your paths, and adds a lot of nice built in functionality to Eclipse.

Even if you've already installed Eclipse, you can add it as a plugin (I haven't tried that myself). It is by Motorola, so they have some Motorola centric functionality as well, such as the ability to add your app to the Motorola market. Anyway if you're interested, give it a shot: http://developer.motorola.com/docstools/motodevstudio/

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

You can also develop rich UI filled Android applications using Adobe AIR. If you plan to go that route then Flex Builder Burrito is the best IDE. Take a look at this post as to how easy it is to build an AIR4Android app http://blog.air4android.com/?p=13

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

Eclipse is the best IDE. It easy to setup android and debug applications in eclipse