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Android's sun sets on Eclipse
Devs told to move to Android Studio

29 Jun 2015 at 04:55, Richard Chirgwin

Google has decided Android Studio is all you need to make apps, and by the end of the year will no longer support the venerable but popular Eclipse IDE.

Android product manager Jamal Eason has blogged that in recent years “our team has focused on improving the development experience for building Android apps with Android Studio”, and it's now time to move on.

As well as ending official support for the Eclipse plug-in for Android development, the Android Ant build system will also get a quiet trip behind the wood-shed.

Eclipse users will be thrilled: off to one side, in a separate migration guide, they're told they'll be learning “a new project structure, build system, and IDE functionality”.

Given the fairly long list of migration prerequisites, The Register expects a fair number of stubbed toes along the way. For example, developers are advised to “make a note of any third-party Eclipse IDE plugins”, and go looking for “equivalent features in Android Studio” or grab a compatible plugin from the IntelliJ plugins repository.

Eason's post also says that over coming months, the project team will migrate remaining performance tools like DDMS and Trace Viewer into Android Studio, which will also get additional support for the Android NDK.

The Eclipse foundation will, however, continue to support its Android tools. ®
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