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Apps What is best Android development environment?

What is currently the best development and testing setup?

It seems most prefer AndroidStudio but the emulators are impossibly slow. What do you recommend? I have tried Genymotion which worked once on HelloWorld default app then stopped connecting.

Should I buy a tablet to test on? I don't have the budget for multiple actual devices.

(This topic has been touched on in older posts and I wanted an update)

Thanks!
 
I never used AndroidStudio so I can't really comment on that, I use Eclipse with ADT plugin and it works nicely for me.

The emulator is very slow but then again, emulators will never be as fast and accurate testing-wise as a real device.
 
I have used both eclipse ADT and Android Studio. Android Studio is the best in my opinion (IntelliJ based) and is the one in heavy development right now by the Google team, the flavor system introduced using gradle is also fantastic.

I personally use the SDK emulators. As long as you have properly configured Hardware virtualization (HAXM), and running an Intel X86 (Atom) based image it actually runs faster than an actual device.
 
Jedid, this is extremely helpful information, especially regarding the configuration of and use of the SDK emulators. Thanks so much.
 
The name of Genymotion is probably completely unknown to you. But I assure you this won’t be the case for so long. You will quickly learn to remember its name once you will try it out. In a nutshell, Genymotion is a feature-complete replacement.
 
Thanks, Systango, I actually tried out Genymotion, but it didn't work because I think I had done something wrong in AndroidStudio. Finally I got Genymotion to run with a simple Hello World.
 
Thanks Alvares. From what I am reading it does seem the preferred combo is AndroidStudio with Genymotion (wonder why they can do a decent emulator but Google can't?) I'm using a couple of great tutorial books, but they are for Eclipse which is pretty similar to AndroidStudio. Some earlier documentation for AndroidStudio is outdated, referring to functions that don't even exist on the latest AS beta. But for all the bumps in the road, this seems to be the best combo for the future so I think it is worth putting up with a few inconsistencies.
 
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