At Sky, we work on a global streaming app that runs across continents and serves tens of millions of subscribers With that kind of scale comes a fair amount of complexity.
That’s why we decided to make our daily work in Android Studio a bit easier — by creating our own plugins.
In this and a few follow-up posts, we’ll share what we’ve learned about building Android Studio plugins — and why it’s worth it.
Global streaming, local engineering
Let’s start with a bit of context. Our global streaming platform currently powers several services:
Peacock – in the US, home to movies, series, and sports like the NFL, Premier League, and NBA
SkyShowtime – available across 17 European countries, including the Czech Republic
Showmax – streaming in 44 countries across Africa
NOW / WOW – running in the UK, Ireland, Italy, and Germany
That’s a lot of regions, environments, and configurations — and all of them share one Android project.
Our Android project in numbers
From the Android perspective, our project includes:
4 streaming services
Multiple environments (production, development, testing)
4 territories for the NOW service (UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany)
4 app stores (Google Play, Amazon, Huawei, Samsung)
And different build types (release, debug, and others)
Put all that together and you get around 250 build variants — that’s how many combinations a developer can switch between. You can probably guess the challenge: with so many options, it’s easy to pick the wrong one.
So we built a plugin that makes switching faster and safer. Often we only need to change one dimension — for example, test another streaming service while keeping the same environment, store, and build type. Our plugin makes that simple. Just one clean change, no endless clicking through variant lists.
Two ways to build an Android Studio plugin
After digging through the documentation and some community examples, we found two stable approaches:
1️⃣ Standalone plugin – the official JetBrains way to create plugins for IDEs built on IntelliJ IDEA (like Android Studio). It’s a robust but slightly heavy setup requiring a dedicated project.
2️⃣ LivePlugin – another plugin that lets you write Kotlin scripts directly inside your IDE. It’s perfect for quick experimentation or smaller tools without setting up a separate project.
Both can be written in Kotlin, which makes Android developers feel right at home.
There are other experimental ways too, but we decided to stick to these two well-supported and stable options.
What you can actually build
JetBrains lists several categories of plugins — here are the most common ones:
Custom language support – add a new language to the IDE
Framework integration – support for custom frameworks when starting a new project
Tool integration – connect an external tool so you don’t need to leave the IDE
User interface add-ons – add buttons, menus, or panels with your own behavior
Themes – customise the IDE look and feel
For our case, we focused on User interface add-ons, especially two components:
Action – a custom menu item that performs a defined action.
We use this for quickly adding new modules to the project based on a predefined template (check out the image below).
ToolWindow – a custom side panel inside Android Studio.
This is the heart of our plugin: it breaks the long list of 250 build variants into clear dimensions (Environment, Territory, Store, Proposition, Build type).
Instead of scrolling forever, we now just pick the one dimension we want to change — say, switching to a different streaming service or app store — and we’re done.
Results and real feedback
Like any good IT project, this one evolved iteratively.
We rolled out the first version, collected feedback from the team, and kept improving it.
The results?
Developers say it’s simpler and faster to work with.
The chance of selecting the wrong build variant has dropped from about 1 in 4 to almost zero.
Switching time went down from 30 seconds to around 5 seconds.
Not bad for a side project born out of daily frustration.
In the next articles, we’ll dive deeper — sharing real code examples and showing how to build both Standalone and LivePlugin versions.
Stay tuned, and maybe you’ll soon build your own Android Studio plugin too.
Here’s how Leopold walked through building the plugin at mDevCamp 2025.
