Android Studio vs Apache Ant: What are the differences?
Developers describe Android Studio as "Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA". Android Studio is a new Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. It provides new features and improvements over Eclipse ADT and will be the official Android IDE once it's ready. On the other hand, Apache Ant is detailed as "Java based build tool". Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.
Android Studio can be classified as a tool in the "Integrated Development Environment" category, while Apache Ant is grouped under "Java Build Tools".
Some of the features offered by Android Studio are:
- Flexible Gradle-based build system.
- Build variants and multiple APK generation.
- Expanded template support for Google Services and various device types.
On the other hand, Apache Ant provides the following key features:
- The most complete Java build and deployment tool available.
- Platform neutral and can handle platform specific properties such as file separators
- Can be used to perform platform specific tasks such as modifying the modified time of a file using 'touch' command
"Android studio is a great tool, getting better and bet " is the top reason why over 164 developers like Android Studio, while over 3 developers mention "Flexible" as the leading cause for choosing Apache Ant.
Apache Ant is an open source tool with 247 GitHub stars and 254 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Ant's open source repository on GitHub.
Google, Lyft, and 9GAG are some of the popular companies that use Android Studio, whereas Apache Ant is used by LinkedIn, Webedia, and Smart.Biz. Android Studio has a broader approval, being mentioned in 928 company stacks & 691 developers stacks; compared to Apache Ant, which is listed in 24 company stacks and 12 developer stacks.
