Android Studio vs Bower: What are the differences?
What is Android Studio? 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.
What is Bower? A package manager for the web. Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.
Android Studio can be classified as a tool in the "Integrated Development Environment" category, while Bower is grouped under "Front End Package Manager".
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, Bower provides the following key features:
- Bower operates at a lower level than previous attempts at client-side package management – such as Jam, Volo, or Ender. These managers could consume Bower as a dependency.
- Bower's aim is simply to install packages, resolve dependencies from a bower.json, check versions, and then provide an API which reports on these things. Nothing more. This is a major diversion from past attempts at browser package management.
- Bower offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of package management, while exposing an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack.
"Android studio is a great tool, getting better and bet " is the top reason why over 164 developers like Android Studio, while over 482 developers mention "Package management" as the leading cause for choosing Bower.
Bower is an open source tool with 15.2K GitHub stars and 1.97K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Bower's open source repository on GitHub.
Google, Lyft, and 9GAG are some of the popular companies that use Android Studio, whereas Bower is used by Twitter, MIT, and Typeform. Android Studio has a broader approval, being mentioned in 928 company stacks & 690 developers stacks; compared to Bower, which is listed in 803 company stacks and 395 developer stacks.
