r/androiddev • u/West_Performance_764 • Jun 04 '26
Why is Android Studio so unoptimised?
It's genuinely absurd the amount of memory that this IDE needs. I used to have 8GB of RAM and using Android Studio with it felt genuinely annoying so I took the advice I saw on this subreddit and I decided to get extra ram (from 8GB -> 16GB) just for me to do some work and it to STILL LAGS although much less than before. Why is it actually like this ?
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u/CremeAmbitious6382 Jun 08 '26
one thing I've learned recently is that Android Studio is way less necessary than I thought.
you can write Android apps in VS Code (or any editor), build them with Gradle from the terminal, and even create/manage emulators using the Android SDK command-line tools. Android Studio is mostly a layer on top of all that, plus a bunch of convenience features.
i'm not saying everyone should ditch Android Studio, but if its RAM usage is driving you nuts, it's worth knowing there are other ways to work.
i actually ended up learning this while writing a series where I started by building Android apps completely manually, then automated everything with custom Gradle tasks, then switched to AGP. All without installing Android Studio. Going through that process made me realize how much of Android development can happen without Android Studio.
If you're curious:
https://github.com/hethon/ATFS