I have mixed feelings about Android Studio, Google’s new IDE for Android development.

On the one hand, the official Eclipse-based ADT has always been pretty bad. Performance is terrible, memory consumption is insane, it breaks down all the time, and I have persistent issues that force me to “clean” projects and restart the application dozens of times a day (literally). It always felt to me like was a very ghetto solution, even if it was one that was (slowly) improving.

I don’t hate Eclipse per se. FDT, the IDE I use for developing ActionScript 3 content, is also based on it, and it flies (very smooth; I never get any problems on it at all). So while I don’t doubt Eclipse was the main source of the clunkiness of ADT, I’m pretty sure solutions existed.

That’s why I’m kind of puzzled that instead of taking a good, hard look at ADT, and in cleaning up stuff that they don’t need, they’ve chosen to go with a completely new IDE based off another solution.

I do love IntelliJ, at least from the limited experience I’ve had with it through WebStorm, which is my HTML/JS development IDE of choice.

But frankly Android Studio feels kind of crappy.

I know it’s a beta, or alpha, or preview, or whatever they’re calling it to mean it’s not a complete or stable application. I get that. But judging from most of the interface and how some thing are still so broken, and so slow, I fear that they’re switching from one semi-broken development solution to another semi-broken development solution of a different flavor.

Android development really needs a better environment. As it is it works, but in a very clunky fashion. We did need a refresh of some kind.

I just hope Google is as serious about Android Studio as it needs to be, and that the current build is not indicative of the target quality they want to achieve.