Monday, December 8, 2014

Android Studio 1.0 released to developers

More than 18 months after its debut at Google I/O 2013, Android Studio is finally leaving the beta tag behind today with the release of Android Studio 1.0.

The promise of Android Studio is a full featured IDE based on IntelliJ IDEA that was built from the ground up for Android development as opposed to the current official IDE, Eclipse.

Google’s own pitch for some of the added bonuses found in Android Studio include:

Flexible Gradle-based build system
Build variants and multiple APK file generation
Code templates to help you build common app features
Rich layout editor with support for drag and drop theme editing
Lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility, and other problems
ProGuard and app-signing capabilities
Built-in support for Google Cloud Platform, making it easy to integrate Google Cloud Messaging and App Engine
And much more

You can download Android Studio 1.0 for Windows, Mac or Linux and give it a shot, and if you have been working with Eclipse with ADT previously, you are going to want to read this migration page to get your projects moved to Android Studio.

We’d love to hear thoughts from any developers that have used Android Studio during the beta after they have updated to 1.0.