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Comment by st3v3r | Hacker News Reader

The answer is simple: Google honestly does not care. The parts that are IntelliJ are great and work as well as IntelliJ does. However, the parts that Google is responsible for (the emulator, the GUI designer/layout preview, the gradle plugin) just absolutely stink. And there's really no excuse for it, other than Google doesn't care enough to put people on the project. If they wanted, they have the manpower and the brainpower to make top notch developer tools; tools so great that men would fall to their knees at the sight of them. But instead, we get something who's selling point is, "It's better than the Eclipse plugin" because they simply do not care.

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That's the vibe of the entire Android project, though. At least the developer-facing side of it.

Lots of the SDK feels poorly-thought-out, even relatively recent additions.

Some things that exist for both Web and Android are worse on Android, inexplicably (Location for instance).

Lots of Googling a problem, finding a bug report for it from 5 years ago, and reading in the comments saga of "not a bug, intended behavior", "no, seriously, it's a bug, learn to read (x10)", then a stretch of months of "will you please fix this? It's a big problem.", "here's a workaround", "thanks!", "here's the fix, it's a trivial 2-line change, please pay attention Google!" then a silent "CLOSED DUE TO BUG BEING OBSOLETE", then several, "but wait, this still happens in the latest. Do you guys even test?", the last of which dates to a week ago.

[EDIT] Oh, and mediocre technically-complete-is-the-best-kind-of-complete documentation full of bad examples (to the point of being outdated and broken, sometimes) and bad advice.

Couldn't disagree more. The Tools team has made huge progress - the new emulator is so much better than the old one, ConstraintLayout is a huge upgrade for using the layout editor, and there's a huge push to fix performance with the Gradle plugin.

I'm seeing pushes to do this, and promises of that, but this is all stuff that should have been there from the beginning. The Preview window still stumbles on views imported from the Support Library, the emulator is a little better but still not great, Instant Run is a disaster, and Constraint Layout just now came out of beta.

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