What's wrong with a sane makefile oriented thing with a small tool chain and letting the user pick the editor/IDE?
Why does every large company build out this ridiculous IDE for their product?
Any chance you feel up to sharing? I've been wanting to get into Android dev work, but I'm staunchly a CLI guy, and I've had a hard time trying to figure out the IDEs Google keeps pushing out. Not to mention the obscene sizes of these damn IDEs.
most Android projects these days use gradle. install it via your favourite package manager, and if the project is well-configured a simple 'gradle build' will do the trick. at the worst you might need to download the latest Android SDK, point some environment vars, and do a basic fetch of the most recent build tools.
android is rather cli friendly - a full 50% of the devs I know use vim or emacs.
I don't have any tricks to share. Just build the app with the command-line tool, and the included android.el will do the debugging integration for you.