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Absolutely agree on Android being the future, but oddly enough the very fact that you can develop using any tools you like creates a barrier to new developers. Too many options sometimes mean you spend too much time faffing about finding the perfect development environment and then jumping from one to the other. The great thing about iOS is that there really is only one way to develop for it so you immediately just jump in and start writing software.

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I agree to an extent, but I'm fairly new to the Android platform and I'm still using the Eclipse+ADT setup described in the official Getting started guide.

I've never been a fan of Eclipse, I used it a while back before moving to NetBeans for Java work, but for the work I've done so far in Android it works just fine and for the most part gets the hell out of the way - and when I want it to get in the way it usually has a wizard to help me out while I'm still green.

I think this is definitely good for new Droid devs, especially those that are new to programming in general - the books I've read, the online material I've read, and the official guides all have used the same development environment. So my opinion is that althrough you CAN use anything you want, you're guided towards the Elipse way unless you know what you're doing enough to work how you want to work.

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