Android Studio Versions

The 2013 announcement, the 2014 Stable, and the Eclipse-ADT exit

Android Studio was announced at Google I/O 2013 in May 2013, as a preview-quality replacement for the Eclipse + Android Developer Tools (ADT) plugin that had been the official Android IDE since the platform’s earliest days. Eclipse ADT had served Android well in its first five years (2007–2012) but had structural problems that the team had given up trying to fix from within: slow project sync, fragile XML editors, an obstinate Ant-derived build system that didn’t play well with the rest of the JVM ecosystem, and a long string of integration headaches against new platform APIs.

The replacement bet was that the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition platform from JetBrains was a better foundation. IntelliJ’s indexer was significantly faster, its editor model was richer, and its plugin architecture was more amenable to the Android-specific surface area Google needed (layout editors, ADB integration, emulator management, profilers). Building Studio on top of IntelliJ Community meant getting a decade of editor work for free and partnering with JetBrains, which has produced both Studio’s underlying platform and Kotlin (the language Studio went on to first-class in 2017).

Studio 1.0 went GA on December 8, 2014, eighteen months after the I/O reveal. The migration runway off Eclipse ADT was bumpy: many projects had to convert their Ant-style structure into Gradle, learn the new build.gradle DSL, and re-resolve dependencies. Eclipse ADT was officially deprecated in mid-2015 (final release in December 2015) and the toolchain assets removed from the Android SDK pipeline by 2017. By 2018, building Android apps in Eclipse was dead.

The IntelliJ relationship and the 2021 versioning shift

Every Android Studio release is built on a specific IntelliJ Platform base. Studio inherits IntelliJ’s editor, code-intelligence engine, indexer, refactoring, debugger UI, and most of the language plugin ecosystem — layered with Android-specific surfaces (layout editors, ADB integration, the Profiler suite, Compose tooling, the Gradle plugins the Android team maintains, etc.). The relationship is open and reciprocal: IntelliJ ships features, Studio absorbs them; Studio occasionally upstreams improvements that benefit the broader IntelliJ user base.

Until Arctic Fox (July 2021), Studio used a sequential major.minor numbering scheme — 1.0 through 4.2 — that was independent of the IntelliJ base it was built on. This obscured an important fact: which IntelliJ version your Studio was built on materially affected which features and bug fixes you got. Knowing “Studio 4.1” didn’t tell you which IntelliJ release it was tracking.

Arctic Fox introduced the YYYY.N.P versioning aligned with IntelliJ’s own release cycle: 2020.3.1 means “based on IntelliJ 2020.3, the first feature release on that base, with patch level 1.” The alphabetical animal codenames give each release a memorable handle (Arctic Fox, Bumblebee, Chipmunk, ...) so humans don’t need to recite four-part numbers when discussing which Studio they’re on. The renaming was contentious at the time — it broke a decade of mental shorthand — but has aged well; the IntelliJ-base information is now visible at a glance.

The Studio × AGP × Gradle coupling — why upgrading is hard

The coupling that makes this page’s matrix necessary is structural, not incidental. The Android build is Gradle-based; the Android-specific build logic lives in the Android Gradle Plugin (AGP), a Google-maintained Gradle plugin separate from Gradle itself. Studio integrates with both by talking to Gradle through Gradle’s tooling API and to AGP through plugin metadata.

Three independent products, three independent release cadences, three independent compatibility matrices. AGP is updated alongside Studio; Gradle ships its own releases that AGP picks up some-but-not-all of; Studio binds to a specific minimum AGP. When any one of the three moves, the other two often have to follow. The error messages when they’re out of sync are notoriously poor — “Gradle sync failed” with no useful diagnosis, “Plugin requires Gradle X.Y or newer” with no path forward, “AGP X requires Studio Y” in some cases — and the canonical compatibility tables are scattered across developer.android.com/studio/releases and the AGP release notes.

Add Kotlin (the Kotlin Gradle Plugin pins both a minimum Gradle and a minimum AGP) and the JDK (Gradle has a minimum JDK to run; AGP raises that floor further; Studio bundles a JDK that doubles as the default), and the matrix becomes five-dimensional. The matrix above is the answer — and the framing matters: every cell is a floor, the lowest version that still works, not a recommendation. The right move when something forces an upgrade is usually to satisfy the floor and stop, rather than chase the latest of everything. The Apple-side counterpart is Xcode: same cascade pattern (IDE pins minimum macOS and bundles Swift; AGP’s role is played by the Xcode SDK; Google Play Store’s target-SDK floor maps to the App Store submission floor) but with macOS upgrades themselves often the binding constraint, since older Macs can’t run the latest macOS.

Kotlin first-class — Google I/O 2017

At Google I/O 2017 (May 2017), Google announced first-class support for Kotlin as an Android language. Studio 3.0 (October 2017) shipped that support: Kotlin templates in the new-project wizard, code completion, lint checks, refactoring across Kotlin and Java sources, and removal of the “install the Kotlin plugin first” step that had been the friction for early Kotlin adopters since 2014.

The decision was strategically driven by two pressures. Oracle v. Google — the eleven-year API copyright case over Android’s reimplementation of 37 Java SE packages — was still unresolved at I/O 2017 (it would not reach the Supreme Court for fair-use vindication until April 2021). Reducing structural reliance on Java APIs was a hedge. Kotlin’s growing popularity in the developer community, JetBrains’ willingness to evolve the language collaboratively with Google, and Kotlin’s genuine technical merits (null-safety, coroutines, interop with existing Java codebases, a saner type system) made it the obvious successor.

In May 2019, Google announced Kotlin-first — the official recommendation for new Android development. Java is still supported, but new platform APIs are designed Kotlin-first (with Java compatibility added second), most new Jetpack libraries ship Kotlin-only, and the Android Developers documentation defaults to Kotlin code samples. The Kotlin Gradle Plugin compatibility column in the matrix above tracks this dependency.

Jetpack Compose tooling

Jetpack Compose — Android’s Kotlin-based declarative UI toolkit, modeled on React and SwiftUI — reached stable in July 2021, alongside Studio Arctic Fox. Studio shipped Compose-aware tooling at the same time: an interactive Preview pane that renders composables without a device, a Layout Inspector that walks Compose hierarchies, code completion that understands the @Composable modifier, and (in later releases) Live Edit and the Animation Coordinator.

The Compose tooling story has been a steady cadence of refinement across the animal-codename releases. Bumblebee added the Layout Inspector for Compose. Chipmunk added Live Edit of literals. Giraffe added full Live Edit of composables. Hedgehog added Espresso Device API. Koala and Ladybug refined Compose Preview, Live Edit, and the Inspector further. Each release has chipped at the gap between “edit a composable, recompile” and “edit a composable, see it instantly.”

Studio Bot → Gemini in Android Studio

Google announced Studio Bot at I/O 2023 as Studio’s AI assistant, US-only at launch and shipping with Hedgehog (November 2023). Studio Bot offered code completion, code generation, and an in-IDE chat trained on Android-specific knowledge. Quality was uneven at launch but improved rapidly through Iguana and Jellyfish.

At I/O 2024, Google rebranded Studio Bot to Gemini in Android Studio, aligning the in-IDE assistant with Google’s broader Gemini model family. Koala (June 2024) shipped that rebrand. Subsequent releases have added refactoring suggestions, multi-file context, Crashlytics-aware debugging suggestions, and richer code-review pass-throughs. The feature requires a Google sign-in and respects the standard Gemini usage policies; it is opt-in.

Coda — the Eclipse ADT footnote

Eclipse + ADT was the official Android toolchain from 2007 through 2014. ADT (Android Developer Tools) was the Eclipse plugin that surfaced Android-specific functionality — the manifest editor, layout XML editor, ADB integration, and the build orchestration over Apache Ant. The Studio 1.0 announcement formally deprecated ADT in 2014; final ADT release was December 2015 (ADT 23.0.7), and Google removed the Eclipse-targeted SDK assets from the toolchain pipeline by 2017. The migration tooling Google shipped in early Studio releases (the “Import from Eclipse” wizard) was a bridge for the long tail of teams still on ADT; by the late 2010s, building Android apps in Eclipse had effectively ended.