Android–Introduction

     Today we are excited to introduce Android Studio 1.0. Android Studio is the official Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from the Android team. It is built on the popular IntelliJ IDEA (Community Edition) Java IDE.

           We first released a preview of Android Studio at I/O last year. We value the on-going feedback from you, thanks! We are making Android Studio 1.0 available for download as a stable release on the Android Developer site.

Download Android Studio

         If you are currently developing for Android or thinking about getting started, now is the time to download Android Studio 1.0 (or upgrade if you are using an earlier version). Similar to the Chrome release channels, Android Studio will continue to receive updates on four different release channels: Stable, Beta, Dev, and Canary. Canary builds are at the bleeding edge of development, while the stable release is fully tested. With this range of release channels you can choose how quickly you want to get the latest features for Android Studio.

Android Studio features

          With the release of Android Studio, you have access to a new set of features to enable your development workflow. Some of the key features of Android Studio are listed below, but make sure to check out the Android Studio page for a full feature overview.

Startup experience

• First-run setup wizard — The getting started experience now installs the right Android SDK, sets up your development environment settings, and creates an optimized emulator for testing your app. Plus, we include a set of code templates to help you get started.

  

• Sample Importing & templates — Android Studio includes wizards that enable you to start with new project templates or import Google code samples.

  

Code and resource editing, user interface design

• Code Editing — Android Studio takes advantage of all the intelligent code editing capabilities of IntelliJ IDEA such as advanced code completion, refactoring, and code analysis.

  

• Internationalization string editing — Manage string translations of your app in Android Studio.

  

• User interface design — Edit and preview your Android Layouts across multiple screen sizes, languages, and even API versions.

  

Performance analysis

• Memory monitor — View the memory usage of your app over time to help find ways to improve the performance of your app.

  

Unified build system

• Android Studio uses a Gradle-based build system that provides a lot of flexibility and extensibility, as well as the ability to build from within and outside of the IDE. This unified build system decouples the build from Studio itself, meaning that Studio updates never impact the output of your build.
• Some of the key features of the build systems are: build variant support to better handle different build types (debug vs. release), or different versions of the same app (paid vs. free), multi-apks handling through splits, multi-dex support, and dependency management for 3rd party libraries.

Instant access to Google Cloud Services

• Android Studio even enables an easy way to add Google Cloud Backends & Endpoints to your app, as well as Google Cloud Messaging (find out more).

  

Time to migrate & update

If you are an Eclipse user, check out our migration steps or you can just import your projects right into Android Studio with the import wizard, shown below:

If you were using one of the early versions of Android Studio, you should also upgrade to version 1.0 since we have added a host of new features and have addressed many bugs.

We have also released version 1.0 of the Gradle plugin with a file format that is now stable. The communication between Android Studio and the Gradle plugin is now stable, so updating one will not require updating the other. Check the technical release notes for additional tips for updating your previous Android Studio projects.