Why Android Studio Is Better For Android Developers Instead Of Eclipse

At present, more than 76.6% of the Smartphone’s, including HTC, LG and Samsung Models use Android as their operating system (OS), and expecting that Android will be in smart watches, laptops, car very soon. Android powered devices including tablets have become the foremost need of all the tech-savvy people across the world and the prime reason is it provides an open source platform for the development of great apps plus allows app developers to immediately publish them. Instead lots of developers want to get associated with Android application because of incredible growth. 

Besides, Android Studio platform developers also use Eclipse to develop applications, but always thought of Eclipse like a "Student-Project IDE (Integrated Development Environment)" and learned about it.

Why Eclipse Is Dead

Want to develop an app and use over 3 projects in your workspace? Then, you have to clean your project and restart Eclipse every 2 or 3 minutes. If want to upgrade Ant, you have to spend some more hours to get back your project to life. In case you want to make your app public than you need to close all other active apps as Eclipse will crash frequently. So, android developers were looking for a more stable IDE and were pretty happy when Google announced Android Studio (AS) in 2013, and Eclipse gradually started to lose its market share and became outdated within one year.

Eclipse couldn't challenge Android Studio as it was designed in a different way in different times. App developers can use Eclipse for distinctive platforms or for a group of different programming languages, but it couldn't adapt absolutely to the world of android app development . However, AS is designed particularly for Android development and to accelerate the android application development process and making it simpler is the prime aim of this IDE.

In this blog, we compare the two in 6 distinct areas to reveal why Android Studio is a step ahead of Eclipse:

• Gradle Integration

Android Studio uses the quick growing Gradle build system that is so integrated, and Gradle is really a great tool. If you have decided to go with Eclipse than yet say to look at Gradle’s features and try it out and see if it fits with your project. In case you want to go with Android Studio, no need to worry about being stuck with Gradle system because it is really good. Eclipse uses Apache Ant as its prime build system that is an extremely robust XML based build system and lots of Java developers have been already familiar with it.

• Advanced Code Completion

Both Android Studio and Eclipse feature the typical Java code auto completion. But, we usually found that the code completion is really better on AS compare to Eclipse which looks to get a bit perplexed at times and doesn’t provide precise results most of the time. Keep in mind, the more time you will spend as a programmer grinding out code, the more you value code completion.

• User Interface (UI)

We know Eclipse interface and quirks very well, It is big and somewhat overwhelmed, but we have to face it because most IDEs are overwhelming when you use them first time. So, keeping this in mind and found that the tools and menu items in Android Studio tend to get me where we want to be a little more promptly and effortlessly than their counterparts in Eclipse. In addition, AS was built purposely for Android, while Eclipse was built to all-purpose IDE that can be used with any language and platform.

• Organization of Project

Although, both IDEs work in a different way to help you manage and organize your projects, but when you want to work on many projects in Eclipse you need to merge them into a workspace. In an attempt to switch to a different workspace, you have to choose the path, after that Eclipse restarts and this always looked awkward. Additionally. On the other side, Android Studio uses modules to manage and organize your code modules have their own Gradle build files which mean it can state their own dependencies. In compare AS looks more natural, but if you have been using Eclipse for some time, then it takes a little bit time to get used to.

• System stability

Eclipse is simply Java based software and a larger IDE in comparison with Android Studio, so it needs considerably higher amount of RAM space with a high CPU speed to function properly. Failure to meet this criterion causes Eclipse crashing and getting unresponsive. On the other hand, Android Studio is now released with very less bugs, and provides a more stable performance guarantee than Eclipse and the system needs are lower too. AS is quick, while you need 1 or 2 minutes for building release versions of complex projects in Eclipse, but can make the same project within 30 seconds in AS.

• Drag-and-Drop

Android Studio has GUI (Graphical User Interface), but Eclipse does not have. However, the drag-and-drop feature is not essential for coders, who are not very much concerned regarding the visual elements of their applications. A developer needs to have detailed knowledge of Visual Basic, so that the developer can use the drag-and-drop feature appropriately. It’s a new feature in Android Studio, but its state of being absent in Eclipse does not matter greatly.

Conclusion

Android Studio is certainly a step ahead of Eclipse, which lost its position in less than a year as the main IDE for android application development and became died out. There has been a huge publicity around it among android app developers  ever since Android Studio was announced in 2013, and without doubt AS meets up to nearly all expectations.

If you are thinking to switch from Eclipse to Android Studio, then I will say try it, use it and then make your decision. I am quite sure that you will like and love to use it. If you’re already using Eclipse, just try out Android Studio and decide how you can switch over to it with no trouble.