In another nod to the winners of the mobile market share battle — Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS — Microsoft is improving its signature Visual Studio IDE with more functionality for ...

New research from Strategy Analytics compared the mobile developer environments from Apple, Google and Microsoft, finding that Android Studio ranks far behind the Xcode and Visual Studio IDEs.

Total scores were: Xcode - 22; Visual Studio - 21; and Android Studio - 13. "Apple's Xcode beats Android on all measures on which it was evaluated," Strategy Analytics said in a news release.

Microsoft's Xamarin team announced the availability of Xamarin.Android 9.0 (P) Preview, letting Visual Studio developers target the next big update to Google's Android mobile OS.

While the fresh new Visual Studio 2015 isn't as cross-platform as that, it does include support for other platforms in the mobile category, namely Android and iOS.

Late last year, Microsoft launched Visual Studio App Center, its new unified mobile app development lifecycle solution for developers who want to write iOS, Android, Windows and macOS apps. The ...