Android Studio vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

Android Studio

Stacks25.5K

Followers20.3K

Votes361

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Android Studio vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Android Studio and Visual Studio Code are both integrated development environments (IDEs) used for software development, but they have several key differences. Here are six key differences between the two:

Platform Compatibility: Android Studio is primarily designed for developing Android applications, whereas Visual Studio Code supports a wide range of programming languages and platforms, including Android development. However, Android Studio provides a more specialized and optimized environment for building Android apps.
Feature Set: Android Studio offers a comprehensive set of features specifically tailored for Android development, including advanced code editing, debugging, and profiling tools specific to the Android platform. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, provides a lightweight code editor with extensibility to support various programming languages and frameworks through plugins.
Interface and User Experience: Android Studio has a more integrated and cohesive interface that provides a dedicated layout for Android development tasks. It offers specialized tools like the Layout Editor for designing app layouts and the Android Profiler for monitoring app performance. Visual Studio Code follows a minimalist design philosophy with a more customizable and modular interface that can be tailored to individual preferences and workflows.
Build and Deployment: Android Studio provides seamless integration with the Android build system, allowing developers to easily build, test, and deploy their apps on a variety of Android devices and emulators. Visual Studio Code, while capable of building and running Android apps, requires additional setup and configuration to ensure a smooth development and deployment process.
Ecosystem and Community Support: Android Studio benefits from being the official IDE for Android development, which means it has extensive documentation, tutorials, and a large community of developers. This makes it easier to find resources and seek help when facing technical challenges. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, has a growing ecosystem of extensions and plugins, which allows developers to customize their development environment and leverage community-contributed tools for various programming languages and frameworks.
Learning Curve: Android Studio has a steeper learning curve compared to Visual Studio Code, especially for beginners who are new to Android development. Android Studio requires developers to learn specific Android concepts, tools, and workflows, whereas Visual Studio Code offers a more general-purpose and familiar coding environment that can be easily adapted for different programming tasks.

In summary, Android Studio provides a specialized and comprehensive development environment specifically designed for Android app development, whereas Visual Studio Code offers a more flexible and extensible code editor with support for multiple programming languages and platforms.

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Advice on Android Studio, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M

Comments

Simon

Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Jan 9, 2020

Decided

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

1.29M views1.29M

Comments

William

Sep 10, 2019

Needs advice

The problem I have is whether to choose Android Studio or Visual Studio? I have to develop a simple app for a school project that can work on both iPhone and Android.

The most important factors for me are Android and iOS compatibility. Although note that i would like to become a Software Engineer when i finish my course. (I'd like to work for Apple, just saying!)

After that id like easy integration for Google Ads and such if i do develop another app that people actually use to support development. (I'd also like to stick with one easy programming language that's compatible with a wide variety of platforms since i'm a beginner and have only ever used Pascal)

565k views565k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Android Studio	Visual Studio Code
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.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Flexible Gradle-based build system.;Build variants and multiple APK generation.;Expanded template support for Google Services and various device types.;Rich layout editor with support for theme editing.;Lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility, and other problems.;ProGuard and app-signing capabilities.;Built-in support for Google Cloud Platform, making it easy to integrate Google Cloud Messaging and App Engine.	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 25.5K	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 20.3K	Followers 169.1K
Votes 361	Votes 2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 176 Android studio is a great tool, getting better and bet 103 Google's official android ide 37 Intelligent code editor with lots of auto-completion 25 Its powerful and robust 5 Easy creating android app Cons 4 Slow emulator 4 Huge memory usage 2 Complex for begginers 2 Using Intellij IDEA, while Intellij IDEA have too 2 No checking incompatibilities	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Android SDK	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Android Studio, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Related Comparisons

Android Studio vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Platform Compatibility: Android Studio is primarily designed for developing Android applications, whereas Visual Studio Code supports a wide range of programming languages and platforms, including Android development. However, Android Studio provides a more specialized and optimized environment for building Android apps.
Feature Set: Android Studio offers a comprehensive set of features specifically tailored for Android development, including advanced code editing, debugging, and profiling tools specific to the Android platform. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, provides a lightweight code editor with extensibility to support various programming languages and frameworks through plugins.
Interface and User Experience: Android Studio has a more integrated and cohesive interface that provides a dedicated layout for Android development tasks. It offers specialized tools like the Layout Editor for designing app layouts and the Android Profiler for monitoring app performance. Visual Studio Code follows a minimalist design philosophy with a more customizable and modular interface that can be tailored to individual preferences and workflows.
Build and Deployment: Android Studio provides seamless integration with the Android build system, allowing developers to easily build, test, and deploy their apps on a variety of Android devices and emulators. Visual Studio Code, while capable of building and running Android apps, requires additional setup and configuration to ensure a smooth development and deployment process.
Ecosystem and Community Support: Android Studio benefits from being the official IDE for Android development, which means it has extensive documentation, tutorials, and a large community of developers. This makes it easier to find resources and seek help when facing technical challenges. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, has a growing ecosystem of extensions and plugins, which allows developers to customize their development environment and leverage community-contributed tools for various programming languages and frameworks.
Learning Curve: Android Studio has a steeper learning curve compared to Visual Studio Code, especially for beginners who are new to Android development. Android Studio requires developers to learn specific Android concepts, tools, and workflows, whereas Visual Studio Code offers a more general-purpose and familiar coding environment that can be easily adapted for different programming tasks.

Android Studio vs Visual Studio Code

Overview