Core libraries, features and mostly APIs receive constant updates and redesigns to utilize new and improved hardware and bring better experiences to the user.
Android 5.0 Lollipop brought about a brand new virtual machine - ART and a thoroughly reviewed code base. It was only natural that the development tools receive an equal treatment.
The Android Studio has been in the works, ever since last year's Google I/O. It is a monumental effort that aims to fully replace the Eclipse environment, which is clunky, unreliable and in later versions simply cluttered with too many modules and extensions.
Google's primary objective with the new Android Studio is to offer the Android SDK as a single fluently integrated IDE, with all the bells and whistles to facilitate a new highly streamlined development process to go along with the ever so intuitive mobile OS it powers.
A stable build of the IDE can now be downloaded from the Android developer portal. As already mentioned it truly acts like a one-stop tool for all your android projects and promises to put an end to unwieldy emulation, hellish dependency and version management as well as many more developer nightmares.
There are some notable and exciting features of the Android Studio 1.0 that definitely deserve to be mentioned. The IDE is now entirely based on JetBrains' immensely popular IntelliJ editor and delivers advanced code completion, refactoring, linting and code analysis.
Google have also gone to great lengths to ensure that its own services, platforms and APIs are easily usable within Android projects. The studio comes with extended Google Service template support, seamless GitHub integration as well as simplified integration mechanisms for Google Cloud Platform services, such as Cloud Messaging and App Engine.
The new Android Studio is also very much in tune with the fairly recent expansion of Android to a lot of new hardware platforms.
The IDE is designed to offer a fine-tuned experience and proper set of tools, depending on what flavor of the OS the application is meant for - from traditional handsets all the way to Android Wear, Android TV, Android Auto and even Google Glass.
Every device type and form factor is readily available for ensuring a uniform design and user experience as well as for debugging with the help of the highly-optimized and pre-configured Virtual Device Manager and emulator. Apache Maven is thrown into the mix to put an end to dependency management nightmares.
All this and much more comes inside a complete package, neatly tied up and supported by Google. So if you are still battling with Eclipse or are just now starting to explore the Android platform you can't go wrong with the new Android Studio 1.0, which is firmly settling in as the standard all-in-one power tool.