Flutter Developers’ IDE Preferences: Android Studio vs VS Code – 2022 Research Findings

Google’s Flutter team builds and maintains IDE plugins for Android Studio (based on IntelliJ‑IDEA) and Visual Studio Code (VS Code), integrating code completion, syntax highlighting, widget editing assistance, run and debug capabilities for Flutter app development.

Historically, Android Studio was more popular than VS Code for Flutter development, but recent trends show VS Code’s usage steadily increasing and even surpassing Android Studio, as illustrated in the chart below.

To better understand Flutter developers’ IDE choices, the Flutter UX team conducted a dedicated survey in May 2022.

In this report, “Android Studio” also refers to IntelliJ‑IDEA.

Figure 1. Number of Flutter developers using each IDE from August 2021 to July 2022 – VS Code’s popularity has risen sharply in recent months.

Our existing understanding of IDEs

Beyond knowing that at the start of 2022 roughly half of Flutter developers used Android Studio and half used VS Code, prior research gave deeper insight into why developers choose their IDEs.

Flutter developers tend to use the IDE they are most familiar with

A 2019 Q3 survey asked developers why they preferred their most-used IDE; the most common answer was familiarity – 80% of Android Studio users and 61% of VS Code users cited “I am more familiar with it.”

Figure 2. 80% of Android Studio users and 61% of VS Code users choose their IDE because they are more familiar with it.

VS Code users value speed in the IDE

68% of VS Code users said they chose it because it feels faster than other IDEs, compared with only 15% of Android Studio users. VS Code is praised for being lightweight yet extensible.

VS Code users are more satisfied with Flutter IDE support

When asked about satisfaction with Flutter support in the IDE, 93.3% of VS Code users reported satisfaction versus 85.9% of Android Studio users.

Figure 3. Satisfaction with Flutter IDE support – 93.3% for VS Code, 85.9% for Android Studio.

Although Android Studio offers a richer feature set for native Android development, many developers still prefer VS Code for Flutter work.

2022 Q2 Survey Results Summary

We investigated why developers favor VS Code over Android Studio. More developers switched their primary IDE from Android Studio to VS Code than vice‑versa.

Figure 4. More developers moved from Android Studio (blue) to VS Code (cyan) than the reverse.

Those who switched to VS Code cited performance (82%) and ease of use (63%). Those who switched to Android Studio valued functionality (51%), integration with Flutter tools (39%), and native platform integration (27%).

Figure 5. Reasons for switching IDEs.

Approximately 23% of developers use both VS Code and Android Studio. When asked why, many said they need Android Studio (or Xcode) for native‑device tasks such as emulator setup, build configuration, signing, and mixed Flutter‑native apps.

Figure 6. 22.5% of Flutter developers use both VS Code and Android Studio.

Regional preferences also vary: while most developers worldwide favor VS Code, Chinese developers prefer Android Studio (56%) over VS Code (23%).

Figure 7. IDE preference by country/region (each region includes at least 100 respondents).

Our goal is to provide a practical and complete development experience that minimizes friction for new Flutter users and maximizes developer productivity. Based on these findings, we will update the official Flutter documentation and roadmap to reflect IDE preferences and usage patterns, and we invite developers to join future user research.