Developer Tools

The Android Developer Tools (ADT) plugin for Eclipse provides a professional-grade development environment for building Android apps. It's a full Java IDE with advanced features to help you build, test, debug, and package your Android apps.

Free, open-source, and runs on most major OS platforms.
To get started, download the Android SDK.

Full Java IDE

  • Android-specific refactoring, quick fixes, integrated navigation between Java and Android XML resources.
  • Enhanced XML editors for Android XML resources
  • Static analysis tools to catch performance, usability, and correctness problems
  • Build support for complex projects, command-line support for CI through Ant. Includes ProGuard and app-signing.
  • Template-based wizard to create standard Android projects and components.

Graphical UI Builders

  • Build rich Android UI with drag and drop.
  • Vsualize your UI on tablets, phones, and other devices. Switch themes, locales, even plaform versions instantly, without building.
  • Visual refactoring lets you extracts layout for inclusion, convert layouts, extract styles
  • Editor support for working with custom UI components

Develop on Hardware Devices

  • Use any commercial Android hardware device or multiple devices.
  • Deploy your app to connected devices directy from the IDE
  • Live, on-device debugging, testing, and profiling

Develop on Virtual Devices

  • Emulate any device. Use custom screen sizes, keyboards, and other hardware components.
  • Advanced hardware emulation, including camera, sensors, multitouch, telephony.
  • Develop and test for broadest compatibility at lowest cost.

Powerful Debugging

  • Full Java debugger with on-device debugging and Android-specific tools
  • Built-in memory analysis, performance/CPU profiling, OpenGL ES tracing.
  • Graphical tools for debugging and optimizing UI, runtime inspecton of UI structure and performance.
  • Runtime graphical analysis of your app's network bandwidth usage.

Testing

  • Fully instrumentated, scriptable test environment.
  • Integrated reports using standard test UI.
  • Create and run unit tests on hardware devices or emulator.

Native Development

  • Support for compiling and packaging existing code written in C or C++.
  • Support for packaging multiple architectures in a single binary, for broad compatibility.