Differences between IntelliJ IDEA 13 and Android Studio

Question

For a long time Android Studio provided better ide integration compared to IntelliJ IDEA.

To my knowledge version 13 of the IntelliJ IDE does include all the features that previous versions were lacking.

My question is: Are there still any exclusive features of Android Studio so that it makes sense to have a separate installation besides IntelliJ IDEA?

Answer 1

Many of the questions regarding the differences between the two have been covered in a blog post .

The gist of it is that the Android plugin for IntelliJ and Android Studio itself come from the same codebase. New features introduced in Android Studio will be available in IntelliJ as well, if not immediately then soon enough.

Android Studio offers an Android specific development environment with some of the common setup tasks (including Gradle) more streamlined.

IntelliJ is targeted towards developers who do both Android as well as regular Java development. So if you use IDEA for more than just Android development, you are better off sticking with it.

Answer 2

Based on my experiences and IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio FAQ

• First of all, both use the same base code. So there's no actual difference in that part.

Android Studio and the Android plugin for IntelliJ IDEA are built from the same code, and all of the changes in Android Studio are, and will continue to be, available in IntelliJ IDEA releases.

• Android studio is only developed to produce android applications.

Android Studio is focused specifically on Android development and provides streamlined environment and project setup

But Intellij IDEA has features to produce other stuffs like JAVA programs.

• You can't really trust Android studio (and it's almost 2016) to be completely stable as it still has some bugs which are unlikely in Intellij Idea.

• If you rely on features that are only available in IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate (such as additional version control plugins), you won't be able to use Android Studio?

these additional features will not be available in Android Studio. You should continue using IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate.

• The only advantage I've seen in Android studio over Intellij IDEA is automatically adding support for appcompat to the project and not having to go through the steps to add it to the project

So I would personally use Intellij IDEA and wait for Google to release a more stable Android studio version

Answer 3

Quoting from Jetbrains' blog:

The EAP of IntelliJ IDEA 13, which includes all of the Android Studio features except for the redesigned new project wizard and the App Engine cloud endpoints integration is available now.

BTW new features of Android Studio won't be available for users of IntelliJ IDEA v12. The new features (especially the Gradle support) depend on the major changes that were done in the version 13 platform, and there is no plans to backport them.