I am an Android developer and in this post I will share my working environment.

Machine

I use a Macbook Air 2014 model and it has been good enough for me. The battery life and the thin profile guarantee that I can use it anywhere I want.

IDE

I have been using Android Studio as my IDE for the last one year and it has been great. It is better than Eclipse in almost every aspect: Speed, sensible shortcuts, clean UI and integration with Gradle.

Emulator

Whenever I need the Emulator (eg. lower versions of Android), I prefer Genymotion over the default Emulator. It is blazing fast, feels smooth and even has drag-and-drop support.

Device

I own a Nexus 5 running Lollipop. I connect to it with a USB cable but also debug over WiFi whenever I feel fancy.

VCS

I use Git in all my projects. Using a GUI for Git helps a lot for looking at branches and commit history. SourceTree has been the best tool in that regard. I also use GitX sometimes.

Terminal

I am a fan of top-down terminals that can be invoked with a global shortcut. The context-switch doesn’t feel heavy and this is very important to me. I used to have Yakuake on my Ubuntu machine and I wanted something similar on OS X. iTerm2 has been the best alternative on the Mac for me.

Browser

I used to prefer Firefox because of Mozilla’s philosophy but Chrome looks and feels better. Chrome it is, for now.

Social

I am a very active user of Twitter and I use the TweetDeck app to keep myself updated. I also have a list of 100+ Android devs and columns in Tweetdeck are very useful to glance through all the lists I have.

Time keeper

It is easy to get distracted (especially with Twitter). I have tried out a few time-keeping tools and I have found RescueTime to be the best of them all. Check it out here: http://rescuetime.com/

Miscellaneous

I used to use Thunderbird for my office email, chat with my team over Slack, etc. But I found them to be distracting if I kept them open all the time. Therefore, I set up email & Slack on my Android phone, used Pushbullet and started receiving notifications on my Mac, instead. I can choose to open, ignore or dismiss these notifications depending on my mood and this saves time tremendously. So, Pushbullet is a must for me.

Here is the summary:

  1. Macbook Air 2014
  2. Android Studio
  3. Genymotion
  4. Nexus 5
  5. Chrome
  6. SourceTree (and/or GitX)
  7. iTerm2
  8. TweetDeck
  9. RescueTime
  10. Pushbullet

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