Android Studio vs. Apache Cordova vs. Zeplin

Android Studio is a great mobile development IDE. I have found it is the best for both Android and Flutter development. It is created by JetBrains, so any developer used to their products, such as IntelliJ IDEA, will find themselves right at home with this IDE. It is very intuitive so it is a good choice for people needing to learn an IDE quickly.

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It is suitable for making portable applications, with almost the same code for several platforms. You can access native features of the device or use an open source plug-in from the repository to create a local database and access the internal storage of the device. It is wonderful for the construction of a native application, through the use of standard web code. It is not recommended for enterprise applications.

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I still have some issues, especially with color integration between the style guide and also project. When we update the colors, it's not automatically sync to every project. Aside from that, zeplin solves my problem for hand-off design from design to developer. I set zeplin is source of truth design file

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• Support for developing in either the emulator or a device means I can quickly diagnose platform specific issues
• The support for Kotlin and Java is stellar, with projects easily containing both types of code with ease
• Hot reload support means that I can quickly test changes without waiting for a length build and optimization process
• Excellent cross platform support means I can develop on macOS, Windows, or Linux without losing functionality between platforms

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• Adobe Phone Gap has an extremely simple user interface that allows for easy learning to occur.
• Adobe Phone Gap provides support for web languages and allows you to write in three of the main languages and transfer them to another language for use. This solves a common programming issue and is the greatest strength of the software.
• Their desktop application allows for easy installation and programming.
• Adobe provides quick support with questions about how to use the software.
• The build interface notifies you of errors extremely quickly and helps identify the issue in your programming. You get an easy idea of what needs to be updated and adjusted.

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• Ease in automatically building design style guides, saving time that might be spent on building style guides in another tool (such as InDesign).
• Users can use Mac, PC, or web versions of this app to collaborate on a single project, enabling us to work with a wider pool of contractors.
• Accelerates the design-to-development workflow, as it’s very easy to import Sketch or Photoshop files through plug-ins, and HTML/CSS codes are automatically created based on designs.
• Provides cross-platform specifications for web, iOS, and Android, which can save developers time in figuring out specifications beyond the “main platform" on their own.

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• Android Studio needs a very high amount of RAM and a high-end processor to run smoothly, which can't be affordable for everyone.
• Updates in Gradle files can sometimes come up with a hectic improvement in whole code, which can lead us to improve some code and consume precious time.
• Multitasking is very difficult in Android Studio due to its heavy consumption of resources.

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• Cordova app code runs inside a webview component. So, expect the performance to be a little slower as compared to the native apps. This is more noticeable on older devices though. It is hardly noticeable when it comes to newer mobile devices.
• Crashes can be hard to debug since the crash logs will not point you to the culprit javascript code. This is not a limitation of Cordova alone. Any other hybrid mobile app development platform suffers the same problem.
• Even with tools like Safari debugger and Chrome debugger, it can be tricky to measure graphics and animation performance. Achieving smooth animations can be a bit of a challenge sometimes with hybrid mobile apps in general.

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• The uploading and syncing of assets is great for sketch and photoshop but we use illustrator and that can be cumbersome/tedious at times.
• There are certain elements that have been a bit confusing to navigate at times, but for the most part, it's pretty user-friendly
• More integrations

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Great tool

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Android Studio is very useful for developers to write the code of Android apps. It provides auto implementation, suggestions, and removes boilerplate codes, which helps developers write clear and optimized code. Number of third party and Jetbrains plugins available to improve the speed of development and help the developer.

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Zeplin's component management and style guide help us to be consistent across whole product and it so easy to use for non-technical person. It is now easy to collaboration for designes between different teams like stackholders, product owner, UI/UX, developers and testers. Now there is only one point of reference is Zeplin so it is so easy to get details without asking designer or developer again and again.

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Overall support for Android Studio is quite good. As the project is maintained by Google itself, frequent updates are usually made to Android Studio to keep the IDE update and bug-free. Many community forums are also available to help developers across the world if they face any issue.

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Zeplin has classic support with a chat from the website. It's working fine, and we're also getting the support needed when needed. However, Zeplin is very good at closing the incidents and moving on. It was a while ago we had a case with their support so that it might have improved since then.

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Android Studio is the best possible offering to make android based apps. It's a product by Google and the official integrated development environment for android app development. That's why it is able to offer the easiest to learn and simplest coding environment to developers. But it needs higher performance and is at times slower as compared to Flutter, etc. So that's the only drawback, but overall it's better than most tools for app development.

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Apache Cordova is the mother of all other frameworks. The Ionic developed framework is well suited for development but most of their features are offered by paid services. As Apache Cordova is open source and has a license to modify it, it has no legal problems to work with it. Also, most well-known IDEs recognize the Apache Cordova snippets.

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Zeplin is great to inspect and share user interfaces, specifications and assets, perfect for developers. Tools like InVision and Marvel are much better to create prototypes for both developers, coworkers and even stakeholders, but they don't have this kind of feature (inspection) as Zeplin does. So each of them can be used for different purposes, offering different approaches to share and interact with layouts for apps and websites.

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• Positive Impact: No license fee, saves a lot of money upfront.
• Positive Impact: Faster project delivery, because errors are cached quickly while typing code allowing to fix the code at the same time, and this eliminates the need of fixing bugs which saves time. Saves 20% of my time.
• Negative Impact: Not works well on low end laptops with RAM less than 16GB.

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• Very economic for ROI purposes
• Scalable for code reusability down the road
• Convertible, easily switch platforms if Apache Cordova doesn't suit your needs

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• Development time has reduced as the design updates are communicated in real time to developers and they don't have to write the boilerplate code as it's already generated.
• Employee engagement has improved as every stakeholder is aware about the design changes from the beginning and can give their inputs.
• Designers save a lot of time as they don't to explicitly communicate when the update or publish their designs and also it just takes a couple of clicks to publish their designs. Also, lot of rework is saved as every stakeholder is involved right from the beginning.

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