I installed android studio on my laptop i5 processor and 4GB ram but it is real slow and it also slows my laptop down. I browsed some forums and read the same complaints there too. Does anyone know a good alternative or do i have to resort to programming on android mobile/ tablet and will it be thus faster ? Thx for comments and help fellas

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You could try using the old Android Development Tools plugin for Eclipse. It's not the official tool anymore, but at least it's an IDE.

Something else that could help is testing/running the application directly on the mobile device. If I remember correctly the plugin supports hooking up your phone and using it as a deployment location (will require some setting changes on your phone no doubt). That way you won't have the emulator hogging resources. If you do want to use an emulator, perhaps give Genymotion a look, it used to run a lot smoother than the included one.

Edit: the IntelliJ Community edition also supports android, if you don't use an emulator that might still give improvement

I have it on my old Dell i15r with an old first gen i5 460m but 6GB RAM. It doesn't seem too harsh here.

What is slow is the emulator. Even on my i7 4th gen laptop with 16GB RAM I had to switch to Intel's Android speed 'em ups (lots on the web about this) before I was OK with that. The issue I have with the old Eclipse setup is that it was way out of date and just a sluggish.

The easy speedup to emulation is to use an Intel Android emulator rather than the ARM one.

Definitely, running an ARM emulator on an x86 box will be slow. Since Android code is just Java using the Dalvik compiler and bit-code interpretor, using an Intel Android emulator will work must faster (or should anyway). Your code should be directly transferable to an ARM system for hardware testing.

I would strongly suggest to get at least 8GB RAM before trying to do any developemtn or it will be very slow. Optimal is 16GB or above. And just side note, do not even think of moving to Eclipse, which is no longer activelly supported by Google

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