Google has confirmed that it is shutting down official support for Android Developer Tools in Eclipse Integrated development Environment (IDE) by the end of 2015. Instead, it is going to offer support for the recently updated Android Studio.
Android product manager Jamal Eason wrote in a blog post,
If you have not had the chance to migrate your projects to Android Studio, now is the time. We are focused on Android Studio so that our team can deliver a great experience on a unified development environment. Android tools inside Eclipse will continue to live on in the open source community via the Eclipse Foundation.
The support plug-off specifically includes the Eclipse ADT plugin and Android Ant build system, which is understandable considering Google wants developers to use its own IDE platform to deploy apps rather than stay dependent on third-party tools.
Android Studio, as has been repeatedly mentioned by Google before, will enable developers to import projects from Eclipse to complete any remaining lines of code.
Eason further notes, that being the official Android IDE, Android Studio will give developers, access to a more “comprehensive suite of tools” to evolve their app across Android platforms, whether it’s on the phone, wrist, car or TV.
As for migration, being a developer, you must already be aware on how to do that. For most developers out there, migration is as simple as importing the existing Eclipse ADT projects in Android Studio withFile → New→ Import Project. For a more detailed guide on migration and related mechanism, you can head over to Google’s support docs here.
As for future integrations, Google says that it will be migrating the rest of the standalone performance tools (e.g. DDMS, Trace Viewer) to Android Studio and will also be building in additional support for the Android NDK into Android Studio. Android tools inside Eclipse will continue to live on in the open source community via the Eclipse Foundation.
