What Android Studio does
Android Studio is Google's official integrated development environment for building Android applications. It is built on the JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA platform, which provides the underlying code editor, refactoring engine, and intelligent code completion that forms the foundation of the IDE. On top of that base, Android Studio adds a comprehensive suite of Android-specific tooling not found in generic Java or Kotlin editors. The IDE includes a visual layout editor that lets developers design Android screens by dragging and dropping UI components, with a live preview alongside the XML source. For projects using Jetpack Compose, Android Studio provides a Compose preview panel that renders composable functions directly inside the IDE without needing to deploy to a device. The Android Emulator, which ships as part of the toolchain, allows testing across a wide variety of virtual Android devices with different screen sizes, Android versions, and hardware profiles, reducing the need for physical test devices. Builds are managed through Gradle, and Android Studio integrates tightly with the Gradle build system to support APK generation, Android App Bundle output, and dependency management. The APK Analyzer tool lets developers inspect the contents and size breakdown of compiled packages. The IDE also includes integrated profilers for CPU, memory, network, and energy usage, which help developers identify performance problems in running apps. Kotlin and Java are both supported as primary development languages. The SDK Manager inside Android Studio handles downloading and updating Android SDK platforms and build tools. Debugging is handled through an integrated debugger that supports breakpoints, variable inspection, and the Android Debug Bridge. Android Studio runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux and is available free of charge. This page provides the full offline standalone installer sourced directly from Google. For safety, only download Android Studio from the official Google domain shown on this page.
