Google has the resource to build their own text editor -- so why don't they do it? It seems displeasing to have to work with 3rd party software in order to develop an Android app. And this is not to say IntelliJ is a bad choice, but it would seem that they could rid away with any extraneous portions of the editor. It could also be optimized for Android development, unless that's what this "Android Studio" is.
> Google has the resource to build their own text editor -- so why don't they do it?
Because they realize that reinventing the wheel for the sake of being 100% google-made is a pointless endeavor.
> It seems displeasing to have to work with 3rd party software in order to develop an Android app.
People work with third party apps all the time in the development of applications whether they are mobile, web or something else entirely.
>And this is not to say IntelliJ is a bad choice, but it would seem that they could rid away with any extraneous portions of the editor. It could also be optimized for Android development, unless that's what this "Android Studio" is.
How is it not optimized for android development. What, in your opinion would be an optimized version of the current IDE?
> Google has the resource to build their own text editor -- so why don't they do it?
Because they don't need their own text editor, they need an IDE; and just because they may have the resources to build their own IDE doesn't mean that that's the most cost effective mechanism available: "adopting" an existing IDE and sponsoring an Android-specialized spin, which is what they did with Android Studio, is a lot faster payoff and a lot more cost effective than starting from ground zero.
(Now, if they had a revolutionary idea for how to do a development environment differently, it would make sense to build it out in house. But that's a different issue than getting high-quality but basically conventional tooling available for Android development.)
Because an IDE isn't just a text editor. It takes a nontrivial amount of time and people to get a good IDE running. If you consider that a lot of this time is spent on features that have already been implemented somewhere else, it makes sense to leverage an existing project and then, on top of it, work on hard features that really have an impact on Android development - as is the case with the new Instant Run, for example.
Modern mobile development does not rely on text editors but IDEs and there is an huge difference between the twos.
Google has the resources to build a text editor, but an IDE ? that would take years and would still be unable to compete with XCode / Visual Studio.
So Google chose to take a great IDE, shower it in money and use it as the basis for their own tool.
That way, they automatically get everything Intellij already offers for Java : syntax colouring, smart refactoring, code flow analysis and so on and they can just focus on adapting the existing tools for Android and adding new ones (Lint, SysTrace, ... )
> It could also be optimized for Android development, unless that's what this "Android Studio" is.
That's pretty much what it is, I don't see how you could optimise it more for Android development.
