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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

I am an Android Developer, and I actually like Android Studio. At least, I far prefer it over anything else I've ever used (especially Eclipse).

Yes, the Visual Layout editor is wildly inaccurate, and yes, the emulator sucks. There's definitely room for improvement.

But if you look past those two issues, the rest of it is pretty nice. I certainly wouldn't call Android Studio or IntelliJ a "gruesome embarrassment". (Is the author aware people willingly pay money for IntellIJ? Even for non-Android, non-Java work? That there's an entire company around IntelliJ and various versions for various languages.)

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I disagree that the emulator sucks. With HAXM enabled it boots up at least as fast as the iOS emu and I can customize it to run different images of android.

Overall I love it. Compared with Xcode and the work I was doing before on iOS Android Studio is a dream.

Can you please tell more about your hardware? CPU, GPS, RAM and motherboard? I am genuinely interested. Would like to know the configuration which makes Android development pleasant.

My emulator runs great although I still have a HDD(vs SSD) which bottlenecks emulation once in a while. My setup is a Core i7 3770K, 32GB of DDR3 RAM, and Windows 7 Enterprise. My emulator is currently consuming 2.7GB of RAM.

Thanks for sharing.

Not the above, but it runs great for me on both my desktop (Intel i5-6600K, 32GB RAM, SSD, some random ASUS ROG mobo), my old desktop setup (Intel i5-2500K, 16GB RAM, HDD) and my laptop (Intel i7-4760HQ, 16GB RAM, SSD).

It certainly runs far better than Xcode, since that won't even start on any of those!

I had a higher end Mac Pro when I was doing iOS development and Android Studio is way more stable than XCode and the emulator is at least as fast.

4.2ghz OC'd i5 4690K, 16gb ram (would like more though), Asus Maximus VI Hero ATX mobo, GTX 970 card. It's not a terribly fantastic setup, it's mainly the HAXM integration on the emulator. If you haven't tried the emulator since that was included you need to. It went from 5 minute startup to 30 seconds tops. And if it's already running then rerunning the app is nearly instant.

My main complaints are - 1) The updates for GPS versions have been quite bad recently. 2) Can't run VirtualBox and Haxm on the same machine.

> Can't run VirtualBox and Haxm on the same machine.

That's exactly what I do. Didn't try it on the same time, though.

What I had problem with in the past, was running Hyper-V and HAXM. Both require their own hypervisor, both need a reboot to activate it and they cannot be active at the same time.

Interesting. Doing work on both platforms, I have had the exact opposite experience. I used to feel like an empty shell of false hope when on the Android side of things, like trying to babysit a rebellious teenager. I suppose it comes down to preference.

I definitely think preference is a lot of it. Just figured I'd share my experience as a happy android dev!

Based on how the Android EMU used to run early on, it is much better. Even then, it is still 50/50 when starting if it will actually boot (and then if Android Studio will connect for debugging). HAXM has helped, but the whole process is very buggy.

Xcode is not the greatest development environment, but the iOS simulator/debugging actually works.

Android development is painful unless you have an physical device to develop with.

> Android development is painful unless you have an physical device to develop with.

Does anybody develop a serious Android application without testing it on an actual device?

I do a huge chunk of my development with physical devices. It would just be nice to have a quick and reliable emulator as a fallback for those times when you don't want to carry a development device, or when attaching it to your machine would be awkward, risky, or horrifically dorky looking.

Not testing, developing.

The IDE talks to the emulator via ADB. It does not have to talk just to the emulator, though. You can replace it with a physical device, the IDE doesn't care.

When you replace the emulator with a physical device, it gets much better.

Testing no. Develop yes. The people with Android phones in the office can add entire features to our iOS application using only the simulator and then test on a device once they are almost done. Trying to do the same on Android is an exercise in frustration.

I am also an Android Developer (who has lots of experience on other platforms like Linux [embedded and desktop], Windows, etc) and like Android Studio mostly just fine.

It is all relative, I guess. I started writing Android apps when the Android SDK on Eclipse was the official solution and compared to THAT Android Studio is an incredible improvement...

It does have its warts, for sure. I don't even bother trying to use the GUI layout designers and just stick to hand-writing the XML. I don't use the emulators, I stick to testing and debugging on-device. (I have had the emulators in states where they worked just fine, but the requirements for lower-level HAXM support to get them running at an acceptable speed do cause a lot of problems in the real world).

I don't understand why it ships with "Instant Run" enabled by default since in my experience that feature still cannot be trusted in any but the most featureless demo apps. That feature should still be treated as very experimental and disabled by default so as not to cause serious confusion among people who don't understand the implications of using it.

All-in-all my list of complaints is pretty small, though... smaller than the list I've had for any IDE I've used regularly since Visual Studio 6.0.

The old layout editor is indeed awful .. I don't think anybody has tried to use it for more than 5 minutes. You just forget about it and write xml instead. Since Intellij is great at assisting you in auto-writing the cruft in xml, this is very efficient.

The New Visual Editor is pretty good, as well as the new emulator. The layout editor has been rewritten from scratch and it really shows.

There is definitely room for improvement, but "gruesome embarrassment" is ridiculous.

Especially with all my cross platform colleagues hoping that they could use Intellij instead of xcode on iOS.

I have issues with the Emulator due to needing virtualbox to run my ArangoDB instance. So I moved to just running Android as a VM instance within VirtualBox. The end result is a fairly nice setup.

Edit, here's a good source for an image. http://www.osboxes.org/android-x86/

IntelliJ might be a bit slow, but it still kicks ass.

What I see in this rant is another spoiled new-school dev who wants everything handed to him on a silver platter. That's not to say Android Studio could use improvement; more that this guy seems to lack the mental tools needed to reason about complex software

If the author is a spoiled new-school dev, then you are a grumpy and bitter old-school programmer.

I don't see any devs, old or new, using HTML table tags to build grid systems just because "Hey, I'm so smart that I have the mental tools needed to reason about complex TR, TH and TD tags". It's 2017, if the author is asking for a more competent dev environment then he has the right to his opinion.

You don't need all that many mental tools to reason about TH, TR and TD tags.

I think he was referring to having the only method to alter frontend components is through the raw data which is XML. It sort of fits how things were done decades ago.

I'm not totally against it, but his point stands. Even C# and .NET with WPF has XAML data to modify directly, but it's much more robust. iOS puts a spiffy dev GUI in front of everything and tailored in a way that doesn't really restrict, but still allows the option to dig into the raw side of things. However, it's still very necessary to reference the raw data on AS, so much so that there's a UI for the raw data.

What do you mean? do you need drag and drop to build UIs ?

If they're there, why should they not work well, and why should I not use them? Using tools like that does not diminish your ability as a programmer, just like refusing to use tools like that does not somehow make your e-penis bigger.

Sure, use them but in most cases using WYSIWYG tools you get a lot of extra garbage then if you write the layout by hand,especially with html. GUI tools are great for new developers though, they can build a GUI fast and learn the under the hood markup gradually, I am not sure if there is such a good GUI tool that makes good markup without the developer understanding under the hood.

> If the author is a spoiled new-school dev, then you are a grumpy and bitter old-school programmer.

Yer damn right I am! Kids these days!

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