Apps Can I use Eclipse for Android development

[David Devoy]

I have been developing Android Apps using Android Studio for 3 months now and it is "quite slow".

I also have Eclipse on my machine for Java projects and it is much nippier.

I understand at one time you could develop Android Apps using Eclipse and I have set it up to create Android projects, pointed it at the Android SDK and I can boot up the phone emulator from within Eclipse.

Unfortunately it point blank refuses to build an Android app. Is there or a reason for this like Google no longer support Eclipse to do this and are pushing everyone towards Android Studio or am I just doing something incredibly trivial wrong?

Can anybody give me a hint which of the above I should focus on? Many theanks in advance.

 

[Deleted User]

When you say AS is slow, what do you find slow? It's the officially supported IDE for Android development. Eclipse is IMO not as good in most respects, and if you're having trouble anyway, I'd be inclined to figure out ways to improve the performance of AS. You can make tweaks like adjusting the heap space used by the JVM. Also, is it your computer generally struggling? How much RAM do you have. Android Studio for me works very well, and the incremental build feature they introduced makes the development turnaround very quick. The whole thing is very smooth and a lot less trouble than Eclipse. Going back to that would be a backward step for me.

 

[David Devoy]

You are more or less confirming my intuition.

Eclipse may be quicker but it is rather awkward to use. My PC is a bit creaky as it was purchased to surf the web not to run development software.

It is an HP machine running Windows 10 (64bit) with:
1.6 GHz Intel Celeron processor.
8Gb of RAM
A 1.8 Tb hard drive, of which less than 100Gb is used.

I have tried configuring Gradle to work offline and run processes in parallel to absolutely no effect. It can still take up to 6 minutes to start up and anywhere between 2 and 8 minutes to build an executable. Even too someone used to using Matlab this is a long time.

I have seen on the internet a few suggestions, e.g.

Increase virtual memory to 20Gb.
Use an 8Gb memory stick as extra working memory.
Dissable any unnecessary apps.
Download a licence and install an Intel virtualisation accelerator

The emulation part is not a particular problem as it is not that slow and / or I can develop apps externally on my tablet which is even faster. Does anyone think any of the other suggestions are worth trying?

Also I have been thinking about investing in a quad core more powerful laptop but I had seen that it is the setup not the hardware that limits things. Can anybody comment on that?

At present I am finding development very, very frustrating with the AS IDE.

 

[croninberg]

Android studio really shouldn't be slow. It's based on IntelliJ, which is by far the best IDE for Java, hence why Android Studio should be really quick. Eclipse is a great IDE, but for Android it is far slower to program with I've found. AS is just super intelligent at predicting what needs to be done at any point for you, so provides for rapid development.

As for why it's slow I couldn't be sure. It could well be the PC. Before the laptop I use now, I was using an Asus with an Intel i3 processor and was basically for browsing like you said yours is, and it for me was a nightmare to program with. Was just sluggish for even the most minimal tasks.

I wouldn't be certain on the setup as AS I've found was really quick out of the box. Sorry now I don't have much tips on how to better the setup.

 

[Deleted User]

6 minutes to start up, and an 8 minute build time is completely abnormal, and would annoy the hell out of me. In fact I couldn't work with that.

It sounds like your system is chronically short of memory. I know 8GB sounds a lot, but modern IDEs are very hungry on memory, and when you factor in the resource hog that is Windows, then there's probably not too much to play with.

I think you should seriously consider beefing up your hardware spec, or alternatively might I suggest switching to Linux, which is much more frugal on its use of system resources, and won't cost you any money. An SSD will also help to speed things up.

 

[David Devoy]

Thanks for all your replies. It sounds like I need to start with getting myself a proper development device. Trying to get by with a web browsing PC ? that way lies insanity.