Apps Does Android SDK come with an IDE? Eclipse alternatives are ?

[Mel_3]

About to setup Android Development Station.

1 - Does the Android SDK come with an IDE?
2 - Or does most of the Android Development community use Eclipse?
3 - What other IDE's are popular for Android Developent?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Wolf2000me]

Firstly, I'm not a huge Android expert. That said...

1. Not that I know of.
2. I would guess so, however most internet users still use IE

3.
I use IntelliJ Idea Ultimate with developer license. However the free community edition also has native Android support.
IntelliJ IDEA :: Best Java IDE to do more high-quality code in less time

My development environment includes Maven2 as well. Works fantastically with IntelliJ too and it allows me to deploy to an emulator as well, which you can configure in IntelliJ. Of course I also use Maven2 for packaging and dependency management.
At work I have to use Eclipse and I'm not too happy about that. I think it's error prone and has too much configuration madness.
edit: I also think Eclipse depends too highly on third party plugins, which I think are also error prone, certainly with different Eclipse versions.

 

[Malkoma]

There is also the Netbeans IDE, very similar to Eclipse but much much easier for beginners as it doesn't have the huge range of options Eclipse shows. It needs an Android plugin, called NBAndroid I think. Googling will turn up the links and there are some videos on YouTube about installing Netbeans.

 

[jonbonazza]

There are a few different IDEs available with android plugins, but Eclipse is the only one officially supported by Google, thus it is the one you should be using as it will have the quickest updates/bug-fixes and always have the latest technology.