[noarchy]

You don't need them, but they do make things easier for a lot of people. With Android, at least, you can do plenty from the command line if that's your jam.

[whstl]

My problem with them is not so much that they are GUI tools. It's more that they are bloated, low-quality and a bit unpredictable. IMO and IME, of course. They do get the job done, and people can get used to them if they use daily. But if using them is not your daily job (and Stockholm Syndrome hasn't set in), they make for a terrible developer experience. They take a lot of time to setup and there's often various problems with versioning, for example. All IMO and IME, of course.

I used to work in a Cordova/PhoneGap/Ionic/[whatever the name is today] app I had to make those bi-monthly excursions to the codebase that would always take a couple days because of Android Studio or Xcode. Setting the tooling in a new computer or teaching this to a new developer would require a lot of fiddling with version for half a day or more until it worked properly.

Sure, if you work on it everyday it doesn't suck, but working with multiple apps or working with different things was always a terrible experience.

[yoz-y]

I only used Android Studio when it was in beta so can't say much about that. But XCode is honestly quite good, not perfect by any means, but especially with Swift and SwiftUI it has some really good features (to wit: live previews).

Provisioning and testing purchases is always a mess, but that's mostly because the code world meets politics there.