Does anyone have an experience with Android development with intelliJ IDEA IDE? Does it suit all the needs?
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Answer
IDEA is an excellent IDE overall. Android support is quite good with the exception of the WYSIWYG layout editor which IDEA doesn’t have. This isn’t a huge problem since I find that the one in Eclipse doesn’t work half the time anyhow.
I’ve been using IDEA for a long time (many years) and happily pay for the commercial license. I find the UI to be more intuitive and more productive than Eclipse. Code completions are smarter, editing is generally smoother, debugging is a bit more reliable (though neither IDEA or Eclipse seems to have flawless integration with adb–probably adb problems).
Eclipse does have slightly better integration with some Android tools such as DDMS which can be hosted in a perspective in Eclipse.
If you find Eclipse confusing and frustrating to get started with, give IDEA a try. IDE choices are highly personal so I can’t promise you’ll like it better, but since Android support is now included in the community edition of IDEA you’ve got nothing to lose but some time.
No, I don’t work for JetBrains but as a long-time paying customer I can also vouch for the quality of their customer support.