To anyone trying out jetpack compose, I’m having significantly less weird IDE behavior when I use Android Studio instead of IntelliJ. I recommend using Android Studio to play around with things.

Can you elaborate on what "weird IDE behavior"? Perhaps file/link some bugs?

What kinda behavior?

I had a similar experience. I don't remember exactly what was wrong, but in Intellij everything in my Gradle files were red

After thinking about it more, I’ve experienced issues like this before when writing Android projects in IntelliJ mixed with JVM projects. 1. I have to gradle sync multiple times before the alert / notification that you need to sync goes away. It’s almost like the first or second sync doesn’t always take, or there is a race condition, and I have to get lucky. 2. My Deps.kt inside my buildSrc started complaining for no reason that it couldn’t find

listOf

function. Of course it compiles fine. 3. I had a multiplatform library module with a class exposed in the JVM layer, and I couldn’t access it from another module for desktop use. It was a jvm module (to compile for desktop), but it wouldn’t resolve, so I try moving it to a multiplatform module. Same issue. I invalidate cache and restart. Same issue. I move to Android Studio, and everything is hunky dory. There were probably some other strange idiosyncrasies also. These are what I remember though. 4. This is super minor, but I created a gradle run configuration for my

./gradlew :desktop:run

equivalent, and intellij makes it look like it’s going to start my android emulator every time I click run (even though it doesn’t). It’s super annoying. Android Studio displays this much more clearly

Thank you for your feedback! Which versions of Android Studio vs IntelliJ are you comparing?

I see 1,2,3 problems on Intellij 2020.2.3, and not on AS 4.2canary16. If I am not mistaken AS had some improvements on gradle kts support between these versions. Also it's very concerning that new Intellij 2020.3 seems to be released without incorporating support for AGP 4.1. Which has many fixes (like

viewbinding

newer version). At the same time Kotlin 1.4.20 is being released with deprecated

kotlin-extensions

plugin which should be replaced by

viewbinding

. 😄 This seems like dependency hell. Everyone fixes their own project issues, release new version, but don't include other's project fixes. While end user needs all fixes to work normally. So many parties coupled. No wonder why Apply has zero interest to working with anyone.

I can totally feel you on this one! Support for AGP 4.1 is on the way right now 👀. Of course, the whole story is really complicated. Philosophically, I would love to discuss the analogy to Apple here (if we would have time to go into details). Very interesting topic! However, dependency hell is still not a foreseeable danger IMO. Deprecation does not mean, that it will be removed tomorrow 😛

I’m using IntelliJ Ultimate 2020.2.3 and AS 4.1