I have widely used both IDEs. IMHO Android Studio is much better than Eclipse.
Some obvious benefits:
- It supports gradle (this allows you to really control the assembly, create various applications, various subscription settings, etc.).
- In the layout, you can view both the actual layout and xml at the same time, while in Eclipse you have to choose between two tabs.
- Feels better. Performing refactoring (for example, renaming a method, retrieving a class) to view Logcat. Refactoring seems more robust, and Logcat doesn't “disappear” like it does in Eclipse (although it should be noted that filtering doesn't work so well).
- His future. Sooner or later, this will become the standard, as Google is actively developing it.
On the other hand, I can notice three things:
- However, it is not so stable. For example, if you want to view your project modules in the module view (starting with v0.4.2 for Windows), I cannot see all of them. This actually means that in some cases the only thing you can do is build from the command line and edit the gradle script.
- Since this is something relatively new, many libraries do not support it out of the box, whereas in Eclipse, since it has existed for so long, it is more or less trivial.
One example of this is < Robolectric (a library that allows you to run Android block tests on your computer - that is, on any jvm). I really struggled to create Robolectric in the gradle project, and I never succeeded. In Eclipse, that was pretty easy. - The last thing that is connected with others: since Android Studio is completely new, you may not find answers on the Internet about the problems you are facing.
To summarize, it's a pity that I swayed the debugging tools a bit (although they both use the same ddms, so there is no difference, but I noticed that Logcat has a difference, as mentioned above). There is no real dilemma which is better. Android Studio is a period. The thing is when you are going to switch to it.
Just my two pennies.