Products · Product
Android Studio
Raised as a usability problem by 92 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 68 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
IDE feels slower and less efficient than plain IntelliJUnreviewed
20112026- Android Studio is bloated and hard to install and run, worse than FPGA tools2026-07-23
- Android Studio is painfully slow, and starting a new project is sluggish2024-07-24
- Runs slowly and not fluently on a recent MacBook Pro2022-02-06
Builds take 2+ minutes and the IDE freezes syncing GradleUnreviewed
20112026- IDE UI is sluggish and Gradle builds are drastically slow on M1 Macs2020-11-21
- Gradle build failed on Java version format, costing an hour of troubleshooting2020-05-29
- Gradle builds and app relaunches are slow, making development feel sluggish2019-12-27
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Android Studio is bloated and hard to install and run, worse than FPGA tools2026-07-23
- Android Studio is so intolerable the commenter could not explore its debugging capabilities2026-03-02
- Menus and sidebars are awkward to use when the keyboard covers half the screen2026-01-07
- UI not deeply customizable and many design decisions irritate the user2025-10-25
- Callback generation isn't as easy as VB; resizing for different phone sizes is hard2025-07-20
- UI builder fails to render layouts properly, showing placeholders instead of content2025-07-20
- Spends hours trying to set up environment and compile a project, then gives up2025-07-15
- Build fails when the project path contains non-English characters or spaces2024-10-12
- Upgrading projects breaks them in many ways and produces huge inscrutable logs2024-09-23
- IDE auto-adds support library, bloating app size unless user manually removes it2024-09-22
- Opening old projects forces Gradle and dependency updates that break the build2024-09-22
- Build fails with a cryptic ninja missing-library error, leaving the user stuck2024-07-25
- Android Studio is painfully slow, and starting a new project is sluggish2024-07-24
- Fails to install app on phone or shows bogus build errors, needing clean2024-03-06
- Constantly annoys the commenter during everyday development work2024-02-04
- Setting up the tooling on a new machine takes days of fiddling with versions2023-12-26
- Downloads 100+ MB without asking, often without showing network activity, and fails if download fails2023-01-18
- Fresh install errors on launching emulators, with cryptic JDK messages and hours lost2022-07-15
- Simple upgrades produce a sea of yellow deprecation warnings2022-04-26
- Runs slowly and not fluently on a recent MacBook Pro2022-02-06
- Upgrading the tool suddenly floods code with deprecation warnings about the coding style2021-11-15
- Menu items take 5-6 seconds to open when tapped2021-11-07
- Hard to build UIs in code; many things are impractical to access outside XML layouts2021-05-04
- UI builder is so useless that developers learn to write code instead2021-05-04
- IDE uses so much memory it has glaring input lag on a 4GB laptop2021-04-12
- UI lags on character input and file opening under load, making large codebases clunky2020-12-19
- IDE UI is sluggish and Gradle builds are drastically slow on M1 Macs2020-11-21
- Gradle build failed on Java version format, costing an hour of troubleshooting2020-05-29
- IDE feels slow because of heavy build tooling and layered abstractions2020-05-10
- Java/Kotlin IDE became so slow on the developer's laptop it was unusable2020-05-10
- Slow, resource-heavy IDE that needs a powerful machine, and frequent regressions in stable releases2020-04-05
- Takes 15+ seconds to open, then UI stays locked another 5-10 seconds2020-01-28
- Gradle builds and app relaunches are slow, making development feel sluggish2019-12-27
- IDE is ugly, slow, and drains battery quickly2019-10-23
- Building UI layouts in Android Studio is cumbersome and hard to work with2019-10-15
- Android Studio is sluggish and feels like a drag to use2019-08-27
- IDE and build tool updates repeatedly break builds with cryptic error messages2019-05-26
- Klunky UI, and SDK and AVD managers only reachable with a project open2019-05-11
- Built-in new project template broken from the start; UI editor throws errors2019-03-27
- Slow performance for large Java apps like Android Studio2019-03-06
- IDE is very slow to respond on a powerful laptop2019-03-04
- IDE feels very slow and less efficient than plain IntelliJ2018-09-25
- Editor runs very slowly on low-end hardware, constantly indexing2018-09-25
- Sluggish startup, slow GUI and very slow compiles cause the user to give up2018-09-25
- Each upgrade breaks the whole development setup, so the team stays on old versions2018-09-25
- Gradle configuration is non-intuitive, so people cargo-cult fixes and struggle to solve problems2018-09-25
- IDE gets slower and more bloated with each release on 16GB RAM2018-09-24
- Options are buried in nested menus, so changes require repeatedly reopening the IDE2018-04-21
- Each update breaks existing projects, forcing manual copying of every file into a new project2018-03-27
- Upgrade throws cryptic Gradle dependency errors with confusing fix prompts users can't understand2018-03-27