Android Studio


Android Studio is the official integrated development environment for Google's Android operating system, built on JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA software and designed specifically for Android development. It is available for download on Windows, macOS and Linux based operating systems or as a subscription-based service in 2020. It is a replacement for the Eclipse Android Development Tools as the primary IDE for native Android application development.
Android Studio was announced on May 16, 2013 at the Google I/O conference. It was in early access preview stage starting from version 0.1 in May 2013, then entered beta stage starting from version 0.8 which was released in June 2014. The first stable build was released in December 2014, starting from version 1.0.
On May 7, 2019, Kotlin replaced Java as Google's preferred language for Android app development. Java is still supported, as is C++.

Features

The following features are provided in the current stable version:
Android Studio supports all the same programming languages of IntelliJ e.g. Java, C++, and more with extensions, such as Go; and Android Studio 3.0 or later supports Kotlin and "all Java 7 language features and a subset of Java 8 language features that vary by platform version." External projects backport some Java 9 features. While IntelliJ states that Android Studio is built on supports all released Java versions, and Java 12, it's not clear to what level Android Studio supports Java versions up to Java 12. At least some new language features up to Java 12 are usable in Android.

Version history

The following is a list of Android Studio's major releases:
VersionRelease date
1.0December 2014
1.1February 2015
1.2April 2015
1.3July 2015
1.4September 2015
1.5November 2015
2.0April 2016
2.1April 2016
2.2September 2016
2.3March 2017
3.0October 2017
3.1March 2018
3.2September 2018
3.3January 2019
3.4April 2019
3.5August 2019
3.6February 2020
4.0May 2020

System requirements

The Android Emulator has additional requirements beyond the basic system requirements for Android Studio, which are described below:
The use of hardware acceleration has additional requirements on Windows and Linux:
To work with Android 8.1 and higher system images, an attached webcam must have the capability to capture 720p frames.