G2

Ankit S.

iOS App Developer

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

6/19/2026

"A solid IDE that gets the job done once you're past the learning curve"

4/5

What do you like best about Android Studio?

After eight years of daily use, Android Studio feels like a natural extension of my development workflow. The UI has come a long way—early versions were rough, but the current layout is thoughtfully designed. The layout editor, Logcat, and the emulator each have a logical place, and switching between them mid-task doesn’t break my concentration. I still rely on the side-by-side XML and visual editor on every project.

Firebase, Google Play, and Git integration generally work without friction. Gradle has been a pain point at different times over the years, but once you understand how it handles dependencies and build variants, it becomes second nature. I’ve watched it improve release after release.

Performance is noticeably better than it was three or four years ago. On a well-specced machine, it holds up well even with the emulator running. Startup time is still the one area that hasn’t improved as much as everything else.

For a tool at this level, I still appreciate that it’s free. Over eight years, across multiple projects and clients, the cost-to-value ratio feels unmatched: no licensing conversations and no feature tiers to navigate.

The learning curve is real for newcomers, but after using it this long, I barely notice it anymore. The documentation has gaps, yet the community knowledge built up over the years fills most of them.

The Gemini integration is the most interesting recent addition. The code suggestions have become more contextually relevant, and the debugging assistance is genuinely useful rather than just surface-level autocomplete. There’s still room to grow, but it’s clearly heading in the right direction. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Android Studio?

Memory usage has been a consistent complaint throughout the years and honestly it still is. Even on a decent machine, running the emulator alongside the IDE while juggling a moderately complex project pushes RAM harder than it should. It has improved but not enough given how long this has been raised by the community.

Gradle sync failures are the other thing that never fully goes away. After eight years I know how to dig through the errors and find the root cause, but the error messages themselves haven't gotten meaningfully clearer. A junior developer hitting those walls for the first time will lose hours they shouldn't have to.

Startup time is the small daily frustration that adds up over a long project. Not a dealbreaker after this many years but it's the one thing I still notice every single morning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Android Studio solving and how is that benefiting you?

Here's the updated version reflecting 8 years of experience:

Early in my career I worked across multiple tools just to cover what Android Studio handles in one place. Separate editors, standalone emulators, external profilers — the context switching was constant and costly.

Over eight years Android Studio has become the single environment where everything lives. We struggled with inconsistent build environments across teams on larger projects, but Gradle and the shared project configuration solved that in a way that actually scales. Onboarding new developers to an existing codebase used to take the better part of two days — it's down to a few hours now.

The built-in profiler has been particularly valuable on performance-heavy projects. Catching memory leaks and CPU spikes directly inside the IDE without exporting data to another tool has saved meaningful debugging time across multiple release cycles. Layout Inspector catching UI inconsistencies early has also reduced the back and forth with QA significantly.

After eight years the cumulative time saved from having everything under one roof is difficult to overstate. It's not one big win — it's hundreds of small frictions that simply don't exist anymore. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.