Android Studio
Ranked 10 of 33 IDEs by recommenders
The official Android IDE, praised for UI layout tooling and its familiar IntelliJ base; critics most often report crashes and bugs in releases.
The official Android IDE, praised for UI layout tooling and its familiar IntelliJ base; critics most often report crashes and bugs in releases.
47 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 23
- criticize it
- 24
- approval share
- 49%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 3 years
Median of the 3 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 23 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Familiar IntelliJ and JetBrains base
“For Android development I still prefer Android Studio (IntelliJ based). Maybe just a habit”
Comment from 6 Oct 2026 in “JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025” “I could run android studio and all my modern JetBrains stuff pretty well.”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Spirit of ThinkPad” “Android Studio is IntelliJ with tweaks.”
Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Android CLI: Build Android apps 3x faster using any agent” Best-known IDE for Android work
“Android Studio is a probably the best IDE for this usecase but is not the only way.”
Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “Expanding Swift's IDE Support” “Android Studio is actually pretty great.”
Comment from 4 Feb 2026 in “Xcode 26.3 unlocks the power of agentic coding” “It's core to mobile development still.”
Comment from 25 Apr 2026 in “Ask HN: Anyone still using JetBrains products today?” Good UI and responsive layout tooling
“it is better and faster for doing specific UI stuff because of the tooling and visualization”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “A History of IDEs at Google” “being pretty good for responsive layouts”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “Gooey: A GPU-accelerated UI framework for Zig” Works well on Linux and macOS
“I use Android Studio on Linux for the vast majority of my development.”
Comment from 9 Aug 2026 in “Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change” “No issues at all on macOS.”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Crashes and bugs in releases
“always broke on day 1, regardless of how many preview and candidate builds predated it”
Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Android CLI: Build Android apps 3x faster using any agent” “the Android Studio stable releases that are always as buggy as preview releases”
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare” “Now I can't even get it to load inside the new version of Android Studio”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Notes on Starting to Use Django” - Comment from 1 Dec 2025 in “The Origins of Scala (2009)”
Heavy, bloated, large disk footprint
“Godot from project setup to running on my Android is way more effortless/lightweight experience than doing the way of AndroidStudio and/or Flutter stuff.”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “Godot 4.6 Release: It's all about your flow” “Android studio atill creates hundred of megabutea of hidden stuff on C:”
Comment from 16 Jul 2026 in “Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/SEC on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU” “I'd rather it than the bloat that is Android Studio or Visual Code.”
Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “Xcode 26.3 unlocks the power of agentic coding” Gets in the way as you advance
“then, as you progress, that tool actually gets in the way”
Comment from 15 Aug 2026 in “So How Is AI Drug Discovery Doing, Really?” “If I'd do anything to Xcode or Android Studio, it'd be to split more things out of them”
Comment from 4 Feb 2026 in “Xcode 26.3 unlocks the power of agentic coding”
Other IDEs people recommend
The four most recommended other IDEs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JetBrains IDEs | 233 | 143 | 62% | 13 | 10 yrs39 owners | — |
| IntelliJ IDEA | 206 | 105 | 66% | 13 | 10 yrs18 owners | — |
| Microsoft Visual Studio | 165 | 165 | 50% | 12 | 10 yrs10 owners | — |
| Delphi | 126 | 44 | 74% | 13 | 23 yrs4 owners | Approved |
| Android StudioThis page | 23 | 24 | 49% | 10 | 3 yrs3 owners | — |
What people said
40 of the 58 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“whenever I opened a worktree it took 5 minutes for Gradle to sync”
“For Android development I still prefer Android Studio (IntelliJ based). Maybe just a habit”
“the Android Studio stable releases that are always as buggy as preview releases”
“then, as you progress, that tool actually gets in the way”
“I use Android Studio on Linux for the vast majority of my development.”
“No issues at all on macOS.”
“Android studio atill creates hundred of megabutea of hidden stuff on C:”
“the latest that are available from Android Studio”
“being pretty good for responsive layouts”
“If you try simple refactoring, rename/move a class it crashes.”
“it is better and faster for doing specific UI stuff because of the tooling and visualization”
“It's core to mobile development still.”
“always broke on day 1, regardless of how many preview and candidate builds predated it”
“Android Studio is IntelliJ with tweaks.”
“Android Studio is a probably the best IDE for this usecase but is not the only way.”
“Android Studio makes things easier (even though the Bazel IDE plugin is a whole other topic itself..) but isn't mandatory to develop or run your app.”
“Android Studio has a nifty little tool that tells you what percentage of users are on what versions of Android”
“Android Studio has a nifty little tool that tells you what percentage of users are on what versions of Android.”
“Android Studio is actually pretty great.”
“If I'd do anything to Xcode or Android Studio, it'd be to split more things out of them”
“I'd rather it than the bloat that is Android Studio or Visual Code.”
“the experience had less friction overall”
“Sometimes they work, sometimes they half-work, and on occasion I've had them do the wrong thing entirely.”
“Android Studio is much more stable for basic developer tooling”
“Godot from project setup to running on my Android is way more effortless/lightweight experience than doing the way of AndroidStudio and/or Flutter stuff.”
“android studio needs to be specially configured to use the WSL2 paths”
“Now I can't even get it to load inside the new version of Android Studio”
“you can't monetize Android developers, they use free Android Studio”
“except VSCodium and Android Studio.”
“I could run android studio and all my modern JetBrains stuff pretty well.”
“Android Studio isn't great, it cannot be compared to that”
“My experience is somewhat colored by Android Studio and JVM ecosystem stuff”
“That you don't have to touch Android Studio/Intellij is already a huge improvement.”
“refactoring was broken for 5+ years and ticket is one of most voted”
“stable Android Studio releases that crash on first use after upgrade”
“A lot of programs break on Polish computers when you name your user "Użytkownik"”
“I would definitely prefer it over the "Android Studio Java / Kotlin thing"”
“NDK only supports C and C++ tooling, same on Android Studio”
“It's a daily surprise how brilliant it is it's some things and how abysmal at others.”
“Android Studio Hello World APK is about 2 MB, if I remember correctly.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.