which is the best IDE for developing Android Applications? List five IDE for the same?

First of all let us understand what's the exact meaning of IDE( Integrated Development Environment ), It provides friendly platform for developers and the main thing is that it provides auto suggestions in terms of variables, functions, data type and much more. While coding if want to declare integer data type and after writing first letter of data type it gives suggestions like long int, unsigned int, int and much more. Same happening with functions, libraries and packages after writing single word it will fetch or monetized what you want to write and what's your next step. An IDE acts as an all-in-one solution for enabling developers to code, design, test, compile, package and debug the application software. It provides extensive facilities to developers and generally consists of a build automation tools ,source code editor, and a debugger.

Let me tell you what's the future of android applications which is never ending, Over 2.71 billion users worldwide uses smartphone in 2019 and so what about 2020 more than this particular population worldwide, yes this is huge. 99 percentage are still using their smartphone for setting alarm to wake up early in the morning.

Now let me tell your something after reading these statistics of smartphone, Probably you are getting shocked But this normal so don't worry.

• There will be 3.5 billions users worldwide who use smartphones in 2020.
• There will be graph for average user who used to swipe and click which is 2,617 times a day.
• 47 percent of US smartphone user say they not live without their devices.
• At Present more people worldwide own a smartphone than their toothbrush.
• 500 millions Indian population were using smartphone till current date.
• 35 percent of US smartphone users check their smartphones more than 50 times a day. 
• China has the highest number of smartphone user and it is more than 782 millions.

Classification of Android Apps 

Android apps can be classified in two types, see this below categories.

1. Native Android App: These apps can developed using Android Studio with screen designs(Layout) in XML and Core programming in JAVA.
2. Hybrid Mobile App: These apps can developed using third party cross platform technologies like XAMARIN, APACHE CORDOVA, REACT NATIVE, SENCHA TOUCH and many more.

For web developers Hybrid application is best option rather than native and that give you fast solution , it is easy to simply code an application using Html, JavaScript and CSS and encapsulate into any of the chosen framework and you are good to go. But if you are android developer then native option is good for you because this app is pretty stable than hybrid app, It is not light weight but still good for hardware because of stability but development is expensive as related to hybrid one . If your app is hardware sensitive and interacts with device on frequent basis you should always opt for Native application development.

Best IDE

Google product, I recommend ANDROID STUDIO is best IDE for developing Android applications and also it is officially announced by google that this is best platform to develop android app, if you're native java programmer Or else go with Xamarin by visual studio its a cross platform where you can develop apps for different mobile platforms like iOS, windows and android. Xamarin uses C# to write the app source code and third-party libraries which allow developers to build applications quickly. You can also use eclipse IDE to develop android app but that is outdated and not using for developing android apps.

why eclipse is outdated?

It takes more time for cleaning the previous projects, consider one glance if  you want to develop an app and use over 5 projects in your workspace? Then, you have to clean your project and restart Eclipse every  5 or 6 minutes. If want to upgrade Ant, you have to spend some more hours to get back your project to life. In case you want to make your app public than you need to close all other active apps as Eclipse will crash frequently. So, android developers were looking for a more stable IDE and were pretty happy when Google announced Android Studio in 2013, and Eclipse gradually started to lose its market share and became outdated within one year.

IDE's For App Development

After going through IDEs list my recommendation is tending towards Android studio only, eclipse is also good but eclipse were focusing on multiple tasks but android studio is only focusing on developing android apps so make your choice and choose better out of these below lists and develop whatever you want and good luck.  

• Eclipse IDE: Eclipse is one the most popular IDEs for developing Android apps. It is an open-source software and free to use. It was released under the Eclipse Public license. Graphical user interface of eclipse IDE enables access to various command line SDK's. It has a huge and active community that provides a wide variety of plugins and configurations to build feature-rich applications. It is highly customizable and provides full support for Java programming languages ,XML editors, C/C++ language editor and many more in single IDE. Literally this is huge bundle of things in one IDE.

•  Android Studio: Android Studio, developed by Google, is an all-round integrated development environment that enables developers to achieve what they need. Android Studio uses the quick growing Gradle build system that is so integrated, and Gradle is really a great tool. Code completion is better in android studio as compare rest of IDEs. User Interface of Android studio is pretty simple and friendly that you can find everything in well placed. Android Studio uses modules to manage and organize your code modules have their own Gradle build files which mean it can state their own dependencies means organization of files are pretty good in android studio. Android studio needs at least 4 GB of RAM and provides bug free stable environment, additionally android studio is very quick as compare to Eclipse. Android studio has GUI( Graphical User Interface) so that developer can manage layout easily and Drag and drop feature is also present in android studio so that developer can just drag the element and fix it to appropriate position.

• Xamarin:  Xamarin by visual studio its a cross platform where you can develop apps for different mobile platforms like iOS, windows and android. Xamarin uses C# to write the app source code and third-party libraries which allow developers to build applications quickly. It is an ideal platform to write cross-platform apps using a single codebase. Developers can use Xamarin and the entire Xamarin platform for free as it is open-source and released under the MIT license.

• Deuter IDE: Deuter IDE supports up to 40 programming languages and comes with a “Light Weight, Heavy Coding” notion. It makes good use of virtual keyboard by providing virtual keys integration for generally used programming symbols. It also provides features like automatic indentation, syntax highlighting, and Dropbox sync.

•  IntelliJ IDEA: IntelliJ is another popular Android IDE with a clean, inbuilt user interface. It excels at enterprise web and mobile application development using  Kotlin, Scala, Java, and many other modern frameworks and technologies available for app development. IntelliJ has multiple plugins available for developers to perform almost any desired task and these  plugins are built by Jet brains or by third-parties.