> forcing half of the developers to learn a new IDE might slow down Android adoption.

I know of a platform that forces developers to learn how to use their IDE, their Operating System, their Hardware, and recently their new language, and their adoption hasn't slowed down...

heh I actually know of two platform's if you consider new windows phone.

Nope, Windows Phone (fortunately) doesn't force you to use Microsoft Hardware (yet).

Pardon me? I wasn't aware of any other platforms that you can use to develop for windows phone.

The windows platform runs on third party hardware, including Macs.

I know that you can run Windows on a mac, but you can't use OSX to develop for Windows.

You can't even install OSX on something without an Apple logo (well, in theory you can but you shouldn't because insert legalese and threats here).

In the case of Apple their closeness is not hurting them, and definitely not decreasing their adoption.

In the case of Microsoft... well, they still need to convince people to take Windows Phone seriously, so their closeness only helps to hurt them.

Not MS hardware, but you are forced to use Win 8

The writing has been on the wall for a long time. At this point most of the full time developers that work on Android are using Android Studio. I personally have been using it for ~18 months as my daily driver IDE. About 9 months ago I asked a meetup audience of about ~150 people how many were using Studio and the hands showed about 50%. I imagine it is far higher than 50% today.

The best developers I know are debating between Maven+IntelliJ and Gradle+Android Studio. If this turns off a handful of people that are tangentially attached to Android development, so be it. The people pushing the boundaries of writing apps have switched already.

I know some people personally are more familiar with Eclipse than IntelliJ. I was one of those people. There are lots of training resources for people going from Eclipse to IntelliJ, it is a well tread path. Just give it a try.

" forcing half of the developers to learn a new IDE might slow down Android adoption."

I think it already did that before, didn't it? The shoe's just on the other foot now.

Honestly, if you have problems getting used to an IDE, you'll have a huge problem developing for Android anyway - it's a platform that's significantly different than any out there and learning the IDE is such a minor thing that developer hung up on that probably shouldn't be developing Android apps.

Also, you're not "forced" into anything - any Gradle compatible Java IDE will load and compile AS projects without a hitch (sadly, Eclipse Gradle support is really bad, hence the switch od IntelliJ platform).

Eclipse support of any build tool is quite bad, since they are always seen as external tools (looking at you M2E).

I rather like the approach taken by Netbeans where they refactored the IDE to use build tools as the project format, with known targets mapped to IDE actions.

Same approach taken by Visual Studio as well.

Cannot say much about Android Studio, because lack of C++ editing/linting/refactoring/debugging and NDK support keeps me on Eclipse.