Android Project migration from Eclipse to Android Studio

Chryssa AliferiOctober 2nd, 2015Last Updated: November 9th, 2023

0 239 5 minutes read

Android Studio is the official IDE for Android development, and with a single download includes everything you need to begin developing Android apps.

This example describes the differences between Eclipse ADT and Android Studio, including project structure, build system, and application packaging, and will help you migrate your Android Eclipse project to Android Studio as your new development environment.

For our example will use the following tools in a Windows 64-bit or an OS X platform:

JDK 1.7
Android Studio 1.3.2
Eclipse 4.2 Juno
Android SDK

Tip
You may skip the theoretical part and jump directly to the beginning of the example below.

Let’s start with a slice of Android Studio theory…

1. Why to use Android Studio over Eclipse ADT?

Android Studio offers:

Flexible Gradle-based build system
Build variants and multiple apk file generation
Code templates to help you build common app features
Built-in support for Google Cloud Platform, making it easy to integrate Google Cloud Messaging and App Engine
Rich layout editor with support for drag and drop theme editing
lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility, and other problem
Built-in support for Google Cloud Platform, making it easy to integrate Google Cloud Messaging and App Engine
Official Google Support and usual updates that need no migration

2. Android Studio new project structure

Eclipse provides workspaces as a common area for grouping related projects, configurations, and settings. In Android Studio, each instance of Android Studio contains a top-level project with one or more app modules. Each app module folder contains the equivalent to an Eclipse project, the complete source sets for that module, including src/main and src/androidTest directories, resources, build file, and the Android manifest. In general, to update and build your app you modify the files under each module’s src/main directory for source code updates, the gradle.build file for build specification, and the files under src/androidTest directory for test case creation. Also due to the structural differences between Android Studio projects vs Eclipse ADT projects, they cannot co-exist. Here is a table of the main differences:

Eclipse ADT	Android Studio
Workspace	Project
Project	Module
Project-specific JRE	Module JDK
Classpath variable	Path variable
Project dependency	Module dependency
Library Module	Library
`AndroidManifest.xml`	`app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml`
`assets/`	`app/src/main/assets`
`res/`	`app/src/main/res/`
`src/`	`app/src/main/java/`
`tests/src/`	`app/src/androidTest/java/`

3. Gradle and build.gradle

Gradle is a build and automation tool, that can automate our building, testing, deploying tasks and many more. Gradle is the next generation build system for Java technologies that includes some advantages from older tools like Ant or Maven systems. Android Studio uses the power of Gradle, in order to provide all the above advantages, such as build variants and multiple apk file generation.

Android Studio projects contain a top-level build file and a build file for each module. The build files are called build.gradle, and they are plain text files that use Groovy syntax to configure the build with the elements provided by the Android plugin for Gradle. In most cases, you only need to edit the build files at the module level.

It looks like this:

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'

android {
    compileSdkVersion 19
    buildToolsVersion "19.0.0"

    defaultConfig {
        minSdkVersion 8
        targetSdkVersion 19
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"
    }
    buildTypes {
        release {
            minifyEnabled true
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
        }
    }
}

dependencies {
    compile project(":lib")
    compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:19.0.1'
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
}

4. Simple Eclipse ADT project migration to Android Studio

Here, we have an example of this Eclipse ADT project migration to Android Studio. In this example, we are going to migrate the eclipse project that we created in this example: Download NOW!

5. Java code and resources migration

As we discussed above, there are some pretty significant changes between the project structures between Eclipse ADT and Android Projects. The biggest is that both Java classes and the Android resources folder, are under app/src/main/ directory. We are going to copy our Java classes alone, inside the app/java/com.javacodegeeks.androidgooglemapsexample folder, as we see it in Android package view.

After this, we are going to copy also our eclipse resources folders under app/res/ folder, as we see it in Android package view. If this suggest to overwrite some files and folders, we do it cautiously. We should now have something like this:

This is how our projects looks like, after we have also moved inside our resources folders.

This is how our projects looks like, after we have also moved inside our Java and resource folders.

apply plugin: 'com.android.application' android { compileSdkVersion 22 buildToolsVersion "23.0.1" defaultConfig { applicationId "com.javacodegeeks.androidgooglemapsexample" minSdkVersion 14 targetSdkVersion 22 versionCode 1 versionName "1.0" } buildTypes { release { minifyEnabled false proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro' } } } dependencies { compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar']) compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:22.2.1' compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:8.1.0' }