Android Studio (originally Android SDK since 2009) is the official integrated development environment (IDE) for Google's Android operating system, built on JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA software and designed specifically for Android development. It is available for download on Windows, macOS and Linux based operating systems. It is a replacement for the Eclipse Android Development Tools (ADT) as primary IDE for native Android application development.
Android Studio was announced on May 16, 2013 at the Google I/Oconference. It was in early access preview stage starting from version 0.1 in May 2013, then entered beta stage starting from version 0.8 which was released in June 2014. The first stable build was released in December 2014, starting from version 1.0.The current stable version is 3.1 released in March 2018.
Features[]
The following features are provided in the current stable version:
- Gradle-based build support
- Android-specific refactoring and quick fixes
- Lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility and other problems
- ProGuard integration and app-signing capabilities
- Template-based wizards to create common Android designs and components
- A rich layout editor that allows users to drag-and-drop UI components, option to preview layouts on multiple screen configurations
- Support for building Android Wear apps
- Built-in support for Google Cloud Platform, enabling integration with Firebase Cloud Messaging (Earlier 'Google Cloud Messaging') and Google App Engine
- Android Virtual Device (Emulator) to run and debug apps in the Android studio.
Android Studio supports all the same programming languages of IntelliJ, and PyCharm e.g. Python, and Kotlin; and Android Studio 3.0 supports "Java 7 language features and a subset of Java 8 language features that vary by platform version." External projects backport some Java 9 feat