[echubb]

Good article (apart from advocating developing for Palm??), bad title. It should be called "Why distributing your Android app sucks." No commentary on actual app development itself. My thoughts on that are that Google should develop an IDE for Android developers - Eclipse is unstable bloatware, the Android emulator sucks and supporting different screen sizes and resolutions is odious to say the least.

[sterwill]

People often repeat that Eclipse is "unstable." I can use one Eclipse process for weeks, even months on-end with JVMs from Sun and IBM on Linux, and it never crashes or needs a restart (except if installing new plug-ins). The ADK tools don't have the polish of the core features, and I haven't used them as much as other tools, but what's causing instability?

[echubb]

I've had serious problems with Eclipse's autocomplete/intellisense prediction feature. It often begins listing identifiers and then just hangs indefinitely. I don't know if the fact I'm developing using the Windows build is significant - it is Java after all so it should be platform agnostic.

I seem to have bad luck with IDE's though. I develop using Visual Studio 2008 and that has some horrendous problems, though VS was never known for stability (six service packs for VS6, anyone?)

[biafra]

If you do not like Eclipse, don't use it (for Android application development).

There are at least two other free IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA CE and Netbeans) and you don't need one anyway. Use a text editor and you're just fine. I'd recommend building with Maven but if you really want to use ant.