Android Studio is Google’s official integrated development environment (IDE) for building Android applications. It was announced on May 16, 2013, during the keynote at Google I/O, where it was released as an early access preview. For several years Android development had relied on the Eclipse-based Android Developer Tools (ADT) plugin; Android Studio replaced that toolchain with a purpose-built IDE that Google would maintain and ship itself. The first stable build, version 1.0, reached the stable channel in December 2014, and at the end of 2015 Google ended support for the Eclipse plugin, making Android Studio the only officially supported IDE for Android.
The IDE is built on top of JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, the open-source Java IDE platform. Rather than write an editor, refactoring engine, and code-completion system from scratch, Google built Android Studio as a distribution of IntelliJ extended with Android-specific tooling: a visual layout editor, the Android SDK Manager, an emulator, device-image management, profilers, and APK analysis. In its 10-year anniversary retrospective, the Android team described three guiding principles behind the product: building a complete product that worked out of the box, leveraging a best-of-breed actively maintained open-source Java IDE (IntelliJ), and providing a consistent build system with Gradle.
Gradle was introduced alongside Android Studio at I/O 2013 as the new Android build system, replacing the older Ant- and Eclipse-based build flows. Gradle gave Android projects flexible dependency management, support for multi-module builds, and build variants (for example, separate debug and release or free and paid configurations). The combination of IntelliJ as the editor and Gradle as the build engine became the standard shape of an Android project and remains so today. The partnership with JetBrains (for IntelliJ) and with Gradle Inc. (for the build tool) was central enough that both were highlighted in Google’s anniversary post.
Android Studio’s reliance on IntelliJ also shaped Android’s relationship with the Kotlin programming language, which JetBrains had created. The same platform that hosted Android Studio had first-class Kotlin support, and in 2017 Google announced official Kotlin support for Android, with Kotlin later becoming the recommended language for new Android development. Over its first decade the IDE accumulated a large surface of features tied to Android’s evolution, including a preview and live-editing experience for the Jetpack Compose declarative UI toolkit.
Android Studio is distributed free of charge from developer.android.com for Windows, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS, bundling the IDE together with the Android SDK command-line tools needed to compile and run apps. Because it descends directly from IntelliJ and ships Google’s own Android tooling, it sits at the intersection of two lineages in this library: the JetBrains IDE platform and the Android platform itself.