Developing applications for Android was not always as convenient as today. When Android 1.0 was released sometime in 2008, what developers got by way of a development kit was no more than a bunch of command-line tools and ant build scripts. Building apps with vim, ant, and some command-line tools, that wasn’t so bad if you were used to that kind of thing, but many developers were not. The lack of integrated development environment (IDE) capabilities like code hinting, project setups, and integrated debugging was somewhat a barrier to entry.
Thankfully, the Android development tools ...
