Android Studio is a great tool to develop apps for Android devices. It already comes packed with many features that make developing software easier, but as it happens to everything, it can be improved. Today, I’m going to talk about the Android Studio plugins that I’ve been using since I learned Android development three years ago.
ADB Idea
This is one of the most helpful ones, and I think that literally everyone is going to use it every day. It basically comes with predefined ADB commands, like uninstalling an app, removing its data, granting permissions… It basically eliminates the need to go manually on the emulator to access the app settings to perform changes in the installed app that you are working on.
Once installed, a new tab appears in the upper toolbar of the IDE and you can choose any action through that menu, or even better, and that’s where the true power of this plugin comes, you can assign different ADB actions to keyboard shortcuts in the Android Studio settings. I promise you that you are going to save a lot of time with this plugin.
To learn more about it: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7380-adb-idea
Rainbow Brackets
Being a developer means that you are going to spend most of your day reading code, not writing it. How can we make this experience more pleasant? With the Rainbow Brackets plugin. The idea is quite simple, it just assigns different colours to the brackets in your code, so that it becomes more readable, even if the formatting of the file you are reading is not great.
This comes extra handy if you are using Jetpack Compose, and if you don’t like the default colours, you can set yours or use the random generator that comes with the plugin.
You can download it from here: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10080-rainbow-brackets
JSON to Kotlin Class
This one name is very descriptive. If you need to parse the JSON response from the backend, and don’t want to do it manually, just use this plugin, and it will generate the Kotlin class with exactly what you need. This is not something that you are going to use every day, but in my case I hate to generate this classes manually, and it saves me from that.
Here you can get it: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9960-json-to-kotlin-class-jsontokotlinclass-
Key Promoter X
This one is great if you are like me, I can’t remember new keyboard shortcuts. Every time you do an action that is mapped to a shortcut, it will show a pop-up with the keyboard shortcut that you could have used, so that you have it in your mind the next time. And if a shortcut doesn’t exist for an action that is being repeated constantly, it will prompt you to create the new shortcut.
Download it here: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x
Bitbucket Pull Requests
I know, most people use GitHub instead of Bitbucket, and this plugin is not free, you have to pay once you finish the trial month, but it’s super handful. Personally, I don’t like to read pull requests in the browser, even more knowing that I have a great IDE that for sure is going to make easier understanding code changes. With this plugin you can read pull requests, approve, request changes and decline them, leave and read comments…and much more.
Get it here: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/13538-bitbucket-pull-requests
Bonus
To finish with this post, I want to recommend a useful tool that I like a lot, it’s not exactly a plugin, but you can launch it from the integrated terminal or even assign shortcuts to use it, so no big deal. This tool is ScrCpy, and it can be used to work on a real device, as it were, the Android Emulator. It will mirror the device display in the computer, and you can control and navigate the phone like an emulator with your mouse, record the screen, copy and paste content from the computer to the phone and vice versa… It’s great if you need a real device for testing purposes, and you don’t want to leave your hands constantly from your mouse and keyboard to do something in your phone. Also, it’s compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac, so everyone can use it.
scrcpy (this link opens in a new window) by Genymobile (this link opens in a new window)
Display and control your Android device
And that’s all, there are thousands of plugins that are going to make your life easier, but these are the ones that I’ve stuck with since I started working with Android Studio.
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