Google releases Android Studio 1.0 as official development environment

Google on Monday released Android Studio 1.0, the first stable version of its Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for building and managing apps. The tool, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, was under development for the past two years and is intended to replace Eclipse as the official Android IDE for developers.

According to VentureBeat, the stable version of Android Studio has a few changes compared to previous release candidates, including a new First Run Setup Wizard that installs a particular Android SDK, sets up developer environment settings, creates an optimized emulator for testing apps and bundles code templates.

Android Studio is an all-in-one developer environment that features an intelligent code editor, code templates, GitHub integration, multi-screen app development, virtual devices for all shapes and sizes, app dependencies management with Maven, and the ability to build APKs within the app or command line.

Android Studio is built on the popular Java-based IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition by JetBrains and also includes a flexible Gradle-based build system, expanded template support for Google Services and various device types, a rich layout editor with support for theme editing, built-in support for Google Cloud Platform and more.

Google has posted a help page on migrating to Android Studio for developers currently using Eclipse with ADT.