Android Studio is an official Android development integrated development environment (IDE) for mobile application development in the Android operating system developed by Google. Android Studio is based on Jetbrains'
Android Studio is the only platform you should consider for Android development. I have found that nothing else comes close in terms of documentation or support. There is always the temptation to develop for Android using a cross platform toolkit, such as Xamarin, but unless your app is incredibly simple, you will find your self wrestling with the toolkit more than actually creating your product. If you have any Android projects still in Eclipse, you should upgrade these to Android Studio - the backwards compatibility for older versions of Android is very good, with issues only occurring with debugging on older (Lollipop or below) devices. The only scenario Android Studio is not suitable for is cross-platform development. There is no way to share code between iOS, macOS, or Windows projects with Android Studio, unless you are developing a game in C++. If you wish to develop cross platform mobile apps, I suggest Microsoft Visual Studio.
Xamarin is well suited for several reasons. The first, it allows companies to share code across platforms. If the app has a lot of business logic and a fairly simple UI, Xamarin is great for this use case. Xamarin also works well if the developers who will work on the app are already fluent in .NET. Xamarin is less appropriate if the company has a lot of developers. If there are plenty of resources to develop apps natively then the headache of dealing with Xamarin's issues are not worth the effort. If the UI is very complex and has difficult animations it's difficult to debug visual/performance issues in Xamarin.
Having also done a lot of native mobile development, some of the IDE's features need to emulator their native counterparts. For example, trying to extract a string resource on Android in Xamarin Studio is painful. There are many useful tools in Android Studio that Xamarin should implement.
Xamarin will always be behind on native platform features. They must catch up when Apple and Google release new platform versions.
The biggest pain point is the random issues Xamarin continues to have. Having a large code base on top of a native platform makes it very difficult to debug issues. Every developer must decide if its an issue with Xamarin or the native platform. Bugs don't get fixed very quickly. Hopefully that will change with the Microsoft acquisition.
Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
It has improved over the versions, and it continues to do so. I have no problems using Android Studio and I think that it's quite a user-friendly software.
If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
The support of the community is very good. You can find many solutions on sites like StackOverflow and Brazilian sites like GUJ, for example. Google documentation about Android Studio is very good too. I have some Android developer friends, so they have the knowledge to support me when I need it.
I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
I am primarily a Java developer so many of the IDEs I have used are specifically made for Java development. I have used IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, and NetBeans for Java development but Android Studio is far better for Android development specifically and it also has support for things like Flutter development. VS Code is quickly becoming popular across languages but Android Studio is still at the top in my opinion.
Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
Code Sharing - We were able to launch an Android implementation of our app within weeks after finishing iOS. The amount of time taken to develop a new platform is very small.
Monetization - not the best, but definitely getting better. We've had issues with finding suitable ad networks that work with Xamarin.
