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Comment by chickenbane | Hacker News Reader

IntelliJ 15 was released in Nov, so we're talking 6 months. What features of IDEA 2016.1 do you need for creating an Android application that aren't present in AS 2.0? I use both frequently and it's hard for me to feel behind (so far).

If you're interested in keeping up-to-date, Android Studio also has Chrome-style Canary/Beta/Dev channels as well.

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I don't have a feature that immediately comes to mind but I've run into it before when developing a plugin for intellij. It's just something to keep in mind. I don't understand why there's a separate IDE at all, why don't they just make Android Studio and IntelliJ plugin and leave it at that. Then there would be no issue. You can do so much with a plugin. There's really not much you can't change in the UI with a plugin.

Android Studio contains C++ (NDK) support, which is not available in the Idea community edition or other free product. Only in Clion (paid). Having it as a plugin could cannibalize this product.

I cannot speak for Clion, but Android Studio it is still a pain to use for NDK projects, when compared with VS 2015 support.

Could you be more specific, what are pain points in AS compared to VS2015 when working with NDK?

- Gradle support for NDK is still work in progress and keeps changing

- Android Studio doesn't support ndk-build based projects

- Android Studio turns my core duo, with 8GB RAM, 512 GB HD into a propeller airplane and Gradle builds take minutes versus seconds in Visual Studio (Ant/ndk-build)

- VS2015 has direct support for mobile cross platform, so I can from the same IDE target Android and WP

- Intelisense is faster and more accurate on Visual Studio than Android Studio

- I am yet to test the debugging support, including visualizers in Android Studio, because I lost my patience to keep on waiting minutes even for "hello world" builds

- Visual Studio C++ team tries to improve the experience and actively asks for feedback, Android Studio team just ignores NDK users.

> why don't they just make Android Studio and IntelliJ plugin and leave it at that

Because they make changes to the core. HN recently linked to a JetBrains thread where a blind user opened a usability bug regarding using screen readers in IntelliJ[1]: a significant portion of the code to address that came from a Google Engineer working on Android Studio and merged upstream into IntelliJ.

1. On mobile, can't get the link right now

Do you mean this? https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82716

I love IntelliJ, but it makes a lot of sense for Google to make their own branded IDE for Android development. Android applications are written in Java, but they also have a specific structure and conventions, build and deploy stories, distinct debugging and sdks, etc. Not to mention Google can build great Android layout editors, lint checkers, and other integrations such as the 2.0 flagship feature, Instant Run.

Yes, of course you can build Android with standard IntelliJ, but for making Android development more accessible AS is a great direction. Trying to get the old Ant + Eclipse + random tools in the sdk work together was very challenging, and - at least thus far - AS has been tracking IntelliJ pretty closely so I don't feel out of place. Not to mention IntelliJ doesn't have to be tied to the (very large) community of Android developers; Jetbrains can continue building their product to be more of a neutral all-around (fantastic) development environment.

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