Android Studio Early Access Preview... and You

It’s been less than 24 hours since the Android Studio “early access preview” was released, and IMHO way too many people are trying it, based on the flood of questions coming into StackOverflow.

IMHO, to be using Android Studio today, you either need to:

• Be a current user of IntelliJ IDEA, so that you know how the basic IDE should work and can see where IDEA ends, Android Studio begins, and on which side any particular problems with Android Studio lie, or

• Be a very expert software developer, with experience in a variety of IDEs, above and beyond a year or more of Android programming experience

If you do not fit into one of those two buckets, leave Android Studio alone for the time being.

If you want to start getting a feel for what Android Studio will do for you, try out IntelliJ IDEA. The open source Community Edition already has a fair bit of Android development integration, just not as much as Android Studio will eventually offer. Later on, when you are fairly comfortable with IDEA, Android Studio hopefully will have matured enough that it will be worth your experimentation.

If you are an IntelliJ user, or are a seasoned veteran, and you want to start experimenting with Android Studio, be my guest. Just bear in mind that this is a 0.1 release, and as Xav and Tor mentioned in the Google I|O presentation, Android Studio is broken in many places. More so than is normal in Android, the expression “your mileage may vary” applies. You might consider trying the IDEA 13 early access preview first, as I get the impression that Android Studio is based upon it, so if IDEA 13 is giving you grief, Android Studio is likely to give you yet more grief.