Ad 1. In general terms, Android Studio is as good an IDE as it gets. As for working with pure code, I believe it beats everything else I've heard of.

As a UI designer though, it's still lacking, and no, there's no better alternative in sight.

Speaking of third party libraries, there's plenty of them, but picking one is still a game of hit and miss. You never know if the library will meet all your requirements. For instance, lists. Android SDK still doesn't support things like sticky headers, or reordering by drag&dropping... (Not out of the box, I mean)

Ad 2. Of course there are, however I wouldn't say memory leaks have a significant impact on development time, of all things.

What's really tough and definitely slows developers down is Android's mind-boggling lifecycle model. It's brittle and bug-prone. Its complexity can also lead to memory leaks, but this is only one problem among many.

Ad 3. I would take their statistics with a grain of salt - it's a sample not big enough to be truly representative, much less conclusive - but I believe they're correct in general. Android SDK is somewhat more difficult to work with.

Fragmentation is definitely a big issue as well - Android devs don't have just a few devices to care about, but an endless variety of models, screen sizes, Android distributions (yes, every major manufacturer tweaks the OS a little) etc.

I have more than five years of working experience with KvTech in both iOS and Android mobile development. In this article, I’ll list some of the factors to consider when choosing which OS to specialize in first based on my own experience. Keep in mind that the choice is subjective.

Mobile developers have the opportunity to develop different types of applications for numerous operating systems, whether they’re hybrid or native, Android or iOS. With all of the variations, choosing which OS to learn first can be confusing for a mobile developer who’s just starting out