This is 2012, people still use Eclipse for Android? What about emulators?

Question

I know that the IDE question was asked earlier, but I hope that new IDE / options will appear for developers. Eclipse is too slow / unstable, even with 8 GB of RAM.

In addition, do we have other options for emulators? Android emulators, in addition to slow, I believe that this is not a real simulator of an Android device.

This is my first post in stack overflow, and hopefully having opened old questions, I did not break any rules.

Answer 1

I have 4 GB on Windows 7 x64, AMD PhenomX2 and Eclipse is not slow. I would suggest modifying eclipse.ini to give more RAM memory for the eclipse:

 -Xms512m -Xmx768m -XX:MaxPermSize=768m 

You can also see this blog post: Eclipse and memory settings .

As for AVD , emulators work better than before, but if you want to simulate 3.1+ Platform Device, you will have serious problems, as they are very slow. So, as you said, this is 2012, you should probably check on some real devices.

Answer 2

There are other IDEs and emulators.

To verify the IDE: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

Another emulation option: http://www.android-x86.org/

By the way, I use eclipse and AVD! :)

Answer 3

I hope that new IDE / options will be available to developers.

No one forces you to use the IDE. I wrote three books on Android application development using a simple text editor and command line. The only reason I'm using Eclipse right now is that the drag-and-drop support for the GUI building now makes it so attractive to developers that I feel I need to cover Eclipse more in my books.

In addition, do we have other options for emulators? Android emulators, in addition to slow, I believe that this is not a real simulator of an Android device.

The closer you are to the hardware, the more the emulator will behave like an emulator. Beyond this, it is like the “real world” as you are going to get. For things where the emulator is not “real world” enough or too slow (like tablets, video playback), check with your Android device. All devices that legally have the Android Market on them can act as test devices for developing applications.

Answer 4

It is true that the eclipse is very slow and unstable, but I'm still working on eclipse because of its support for Drag and Drop. If you do not need this feature, go to the IntelliJ IDE, it was the first development environment that I used to develop Android and is really better than an eclipse in terms of stability, debugging and emulator launch.

Like emulators, there are many new emulators available like Youwave , BlueStacks , etc., but you should still stick with the sdk emulator for Android, as it can be easily integrated with development and debugging.

Answer 5

Eclipse is probably the most commonly used IDE by developers. By providing Android plugins for Eclipse, you don’t need to ask developers to find out how to use the new environment (key bindings, windows, perspectives, buttons, ...).

I am very pleased to develop Android applications using the same IDE as for other Java, C and C ++ projects.

As for performance issues, I use it on Ubuntu and with 4 GB of RAM and an i5 processor, I do not find it slow or sluggish.

Answer 6

A 'vanilla' Installing Eclipse using the Android development tools is great for me (I run it on i5 with 4 GB of RAM, and also on Core Duo2 with 8 GB of RAM). You can also use a simple text editor for your Android projects if you want, or the free edition of the IntelliJ Idea community and comes with Android support.

The problem with Eclipse (for me) is the number of plugins that you installed, if you just keep it on the basics (java, C ++), it works pretty fast, some plugins are just CPU HOGS (FlashBuilder, STS ... )

Answer 7

I am a happy Eclipse user on Mac and have been developing for Android for many years. Before that, I was doing JSP / JAVA in Eclipse using the built-in Tomcat support - awesome stuff.

It is invaluable that one IDE can help you make WEB, Dynamic WEB (JSP / JAVA), Mobile development (Android) with the same interface. No need to learn new things - how can you go wrong with this!

Answer 8

Android Studio from Google. This is much better than Eclipse. It makes life easier and improves speed beyond your imagination.