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Android Studio 3.5 Beta

08 May 2019

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

Android Studio 3.5 Beta is ready to download today. Last year, at Google I/O, we heard from many of you that you wanted us to focus even more on quality and stability over features. Consequently, we kicked off Project Marble, focused on making the fundamental features and flows of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rock-solid. Android Studio 3.5 is the culmination of this effort. The results of Project Marble are focused on three core areas: system health, feature polish, and bugs. We are seeking your final round of feedback to make sure we didn't miss a key area that matters to you, so download Android Studio 3.5 on the beta channel today to let us know what you think. Many times it can be difficult to see the range of changes that go into a quality release. Therefore, this post and our Google I/O talk on What’s New in Android Development Tools walk through a variety of changes in each of the major focus areas of Project Marble within Android Studio 3.5. We are certainly not done improving quality with Android Studio, but with the work and new infrastructure put into Project Marble for long term quality tracking we hope that you are even more productive in developing Android apps. What's New in Android Development Tools (Google I/O'19) System Health - Memory One of the major points of feedback on Android Studio is how slow the IDE runs over time. Many times the reason behind this experience is due to unexpectedly reaching memory pressure or IDE memory leaks. We dug into this area, and as part of Project Marble, we have addressed over 33 impactful memory leaks. To identify leaks, we now measure out-of-memory exceptions on an internal dashboard on an on-going basis for those who opt-in to share data with us which enables us to focus and fix the most impactful issues. Starting with Android Studio 3.5, when the IDE runs out of memory, we capture some high level statistics about the size of the memory heap and dominant objects in the heap. With this data the IDE can do two things: suggest better memory settings and offer to do a deeper memory analysis.

Auto-recommend Memory Settings - By default, Android Studio has a maximum memory heap size of 1.2 GB. For those of you with large projects this amount may not be enough. Even if you have a machine with a large amount of RAM, the IDE will not exceed this value. With Android Studio 3.5, the IDE will recognize when an app project needs more RAM on a machine with higher RAM capacity and will notify you to increase the memory heap size in a notification. Alternatively, you can make adjusts in the new settings panel under Appearance & Behavior → Memory Settings.

Memory Settings

Easier to report memory problems with Memory Heap Analysis - It can sometimes be hard to capture and reproduce memory problems to report them to the Android Studio team. To solve this, Android Studio 3.5 allows you to trigger a memory heap dump (Help → Analyze Memory Use) that the IDE locally sanitizes for personal data, analyzes, and creates a report. You can opt to share this memory usage report with the Android Studio team to troubleshoot performance problems.

Memory Usage Report System Health - Exceptions We have revamped our exception process backend pipeline. Now with the opt-in data we have earlier signals of common exceptions in aggregate which lets us prioritize and fix issues earlier in the canary release process than before. Moreover, we reduced the amount of times we prompt you for exceptions, since the analytics and opt-in crash reports are now more actionable for our team. The net result is that you should see the blinky red exception report icon in the lower status bar of the IDE less frequently.

Android Studio Exception Bubble System Health - User Interface Freezes User Interface (UI) freezes are another common issue we heard from you. In Android Studio 3.5, we extended the infrastructure of the underlying Intellij platform, and now measure UI thread stops that last longer than a few moments. Over time, we will have a bigger picture of the top hit spots to focus our efforts on. For example, during the Project Marble development, we found in our data that XML code editing was notably slower in the IDE. With this data point, we optimized XML typing, and have measurably better performance in Android Studio 3.5. You can see below that editing data binding expressions in XML is faster due to typing latency improvements.

Code Editing Before - Android Studio 3.4 (left) and Code Editing After - Android Studio 3.5 (right) System Health - Build Speed We continued our investment in build speed. For those developers with larger projects, it is the number one concern. As we uncovered in our recent Medium blog post on build speed, many elements can affect build performance, sometimes slowing it down more than we can improve. However, during Project Marble, we made speed improvements by adding incremental build support to the top annotation processors including Glide, AndroidX data binding, Dagger, Realm, and Kotlin (KAPT). Incremental support can make a notable impact on build speed. For example, in our preliminary analysis, adding incremental support just for Kotlin has improved submodule non-ABI code changes for the Google I/O schedule app from 9.1 seconds to 3.6 seconds – a 60% improvement. Read more about the performance changes to the build system here. System Health - IDE Speed In the past, a pro-tip some developers used to do is to turn off Android Studio plugins such as Android NDK support to improve performance. While there is nothing wrong with disabling plugins to remove extra menus or options that you don't need, we removed some unnecessary performance hotspots for the Android NDK support that impacted overall IDE speed. System Health - Lint Code Analysis Android Lint is a code analysis framework in Android Studio that helps identify common programming mistakes. However, we learned from several user reports that Lint could be too slow—especially when running in batch analysis mode on large projects. After some digging, we found and fixed several large memory leaks, leading to a roughly 2x speedup in Lint performance. We also published a profiling tool that can help identify bottlenecks in individual Lint checks. Read more about the analysis and tool here. System Health - I/O File Access for Windows Many users of Android Studio use Microsoft Windows. Over time, we received a range of reports from users on this platform that build times and installation speeds were increasingly getting slower. After investigating the problem during Project Marble, we realized that recent anti-virus programs included Android Studio build and installation directories as active scan targets. Since these folders have many small files created and removed over time, the I/O and CPU are partially taxed and consequently impacts the overall build/sync performance of Android Studio.

Google Internal Data, 2.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, April 2019

System Health Check - Starting with Android Studio 3.5, the IDE will check various directories that could be impacted by this slowdown, including the project build directory, and compare them against the list of excluded antivirus directories. If Android Studio finds an inconsistency, you will see a pop-up notification and link to help guide you through the optimal setup. Learn more here .

System Health Notification - Anti-virus Check System Health - Emulator CPU Usage Many app developers enjoy the fast and responsive emulator which has had dramatic performance improvements in the last few years. However, we heard from you that the Android Emulator seems to take an inordinate amount of CPU cycles and triggers the cooling fans on laptops even when the emulator is idle in the background. After investigation and measurement, we found that Google Play Services and related services were aggressively running in the background because by default the emulator was set to AC charging instead of battery discharging. We switched the default to battery discharging, and background CPU usage declined by more than 3x. This change is just of the many optimizations we made to the Android Emulator during Project Marble. Learn more about the Android Emulator and Project Marble here.

Google Internal Data on Apple MacBook Pro (15” 2016), Emulator: Pixel 3 API 28 Feature Polish - Apply Changes Being able to quickly edit and see code changes you have made without restarting your app is great for app development. Two years ago, the Instant Run feature was our attempt to enable this flow, but it ultimately fell short of expectations. During the Project Marble time period, we re-architectured and implemented from the ground-up a more practical approach in Android Studio 3.5 called Apply Changes. Apply Changes uses platform-specific APIs from Android Oreo and higher to ensure reliable and consistent behavior; unlike Instant Run, Apply Changes does not modify your APK. To support the changes, we re-architected the entire deployment pipeline to improve deployment speed, and also tweaked the run and deployment toolbar buttons for a more streamlined experience. Learn more about the architecture behind Apply Changes here.

Apply Changes Buttons Feature Polish - Gradle Sync A recent and annoying pain point in Android Studio is to have your project unexpectedly trigger red symbols across your app code, especially when re-opening your project. The Gradle build system retains a cache of all the dependencies in your home directory that allows the IDE to quickly sync without re-downloading new artifacts. The root cause for many of the recent incidents of red symbols appearing is that in a recent Gradle change, these caches were periodically deleted to save hard drive space. The IDE was unaware of the discrepancy and consequently generated red symbols for missing dependencies. Starting with Android Studio 3.5, we now have the conditional logic to check for this state. We certainly have more we can do in this area, but this is just one example of the types of issues we addressed for project sync during Project Marble. Feature Polish - Project Upgrades Ideally, the Android Studio team would like you to be on the latest version of the IDE since this is where the team does active feature development, bug fixing and performance improvements. We know that upgrading your Android Studio is not a seamless process as it should be with many issues revolving around fixing gradle plugin errors. With Android Studio 3.5, we have updated the user experience on output windows, pop-ups and dialog boxes to help clarify when you actually need to upgrade, plus we made more sync & build upgrade errors more actionable. From a recent developer survey, we heard that many developers upgrade the Android Studio IDE and the Gradle plugin at the same time. As of the last several releases, the IDE and your gradle plugin can actually be updated independently. This means if you want the latest build system speed and correctness improvements, you can upgrade your Gradle plugin, but you can also wait until you're ready. Whether or not you upgrade you Gradle plugin at the same time as the IDE, we encourage you to be on the latest release of Android Studio 3.5 to start using all the enhancements from Project Marble. Feature Polish - Layout Editor Based on user research on the layout editor and input from you, we know that there are several performance and error-prone usability issues that make editing XML the only path forward, especially when working with ConstraintLayout. To address the general usability of the layout editor, we refined a wide range of interactions from constraint selection and deletion, to better device preview resizing. While XML code editing is still a click away, we hope you can see that these interaction refinements can be a big productivity boost when creating and editing layouts in Android Studio. Learn more about the full range of layout editor changes here.

Layout Editor Before - Android Studio 3.4 (left) and Layout Editor After - Android Studio 3.5 (right) Feature Polish - Data Binding During Project Marble, we also took a look at long standing issues with data binding. From a performance perspective, we found that creating data binding expressions in XML files would lead to severe hangs in the code editor. After fixing this issue we also improved code completion, navigation, and refactoring. Feature Polish - App Deployment Flow We streamlined the deployment flow during Project Marble, by adding a new dropdown to easily see and change the device you intend to deploy to and a new menu item to deploy to multiple devices.

App Deployment User Flow Feature Polish - C++ Improvements C++ project support was also a focus area during Project Marble. CMake builds are now up to 25% faster for large projects because the IDE now invokes parallel Ninja targets. Additionally, you will find an improved single build variant user interface panel that allows you to specify ABI targets separately.. And lastly, Android Studio 3.5 allows you to use multiple versions of the Android NDK side-by-side in your build.gradle file. This should allow you to have more reproducible builds and mitigate incompatibilities between NDK versions and the Android gradle plugin.

Single Variant Selection by ABI Feature Polish - Intellij Platform Update This release of the Android Studio includes the features and quality enhancements of the 2019.1 Intellij platform release. The 2019.1 Intellij updates has a range of improvements from custom themes to better version control system integration. Feature Polish - Conditional Delivery for Dynamic Feature Support Android Studio 3.5 enhances app bundle feature support with the addition of conditional delivery features for your app bundle. Conditional delivery allows you to set certain device configuration requirements for dynamic feature modules to be downloaded automatically during app install. You can set conditional delivery based on hardware features such as OpenGL versions, support for Augmented Reality, or you set conditions based on API level and user country.

Module Selection for Conditional Delivery Feature Polish - Emulator Foldables & Pixel Device Support This release of the IDE includes the Android Emulator skins for Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL. Additionally, the Android Studio supports the creation of foldable Android Virtual Devices.

Android Emulator - Foldable Support Feature Polish - Chrome OS Support Android Studio 3.5 is now officially supported on Chrome OS 75 and higher on high-end x86 based Chromebooks. During Project Marble we refined a few usability issues, and now have an installer for Android Studio and support app deployment to external USB connected Android devices. Learn more how to setup the IDE on Chrome OS here.

Android Studio on Chrome OS To recap, Android Studio 3.5 has hundreds of bug fixes and notable changes in these core areas: System Health

Memory Settings

Memory Usage Report

Reduce Exceptions

User Interface Freezes

Build Speed

IDE Speed

Lint Code Analysis

I/O File Access

Emulator CPU Usage

Feature Polish

Apply Changes

Gradle Sync

Project Upgrades

Layout Editor

Data Binding

App Deployment

C++ Improvements

Intellij 2019.1 Platform Update

Conditional Delivery for Dynamic Feature Support

Emulator Foldables & Pixel Device Support

Chrome OS Support

Check our the Android Studio preview release notes page for more details and read about deep dives into several areas of Project Marble in the following Medium blog posts:

Project Marble: Apply Changes

Improving build speed in Android Studio

Android Emulator: Project Marble Improvements

Android Studio Project Marble: Lint Performance

Android Studio Project Marble: Layout Editor

Opt-In & Feedback The specific areas and the approach we took to optimize Android Studio for Project Marble were all based on your feedback and metrics data. The aggregate metrics you can opt-in to inside of Android Studio allow us to figure out if there are broader problems in the product for all users, and the data also allows the team to prioritize feature work appropriately. There are are a couple pathways to help us build better insights. At a baseline, you can opt-in to metrics, by going to Preferences /Settings → Appearance & Behavior → Data Sharing.

IDE Data Sharing Additionally, throughout the year, you might see user sentiment emojis in the bottom corner of the IDE. Those icons are a lightweight way to inform the Android Studio team on how things are going and to give us in-context feedback, and the fastest way to log a bug and send to the team.

IDE User Feedback Getting Started Download Download the beta version of Android Studio 3.5 from the download page. If you are using a previous release of Android Studio, you can simply update to the latest version of Android Studio. If you want to maintain a stable version of Android Studio, you can run the stable release version and beta release versions of Android Studio at the same time. Learn more. To use the mentioned Android Emulator features make sure you are running at least Android Emulator v29.0.6 downloaded via the Android Studio SDK Manager. As mentioned above, we appreciate any feedback on things you like, and issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Follow us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on Twitter and on Medium.

Android Studio 3.4

17 April 2019

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager, Android

After nearly six months of development, Android Studio 3.4 is ready to download today on the stable release channel. This is a milestone release of the Project Marble effort from the Android Studio team. Project Marble is our focus on making the fundamental features and flows of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rock-solid. On top of many performance improvements and bug fixes we made in Android Studio 3.4, we are excited to release a small but focused set of new features that address core developer workflows for app building & resource management. Part of the effort of Project Marble is to address user facing issues in core features in the IDE. At the top of the list of issues for Android Studio 3.4 is an updated Project Structure Dialog (PSD) which is a revamped user interface to manage dependencies in your app project Gradle build files. In another build-related change, R8 replaces Proguard as the default code shrinker and obfuscator. To aid app design, we incorporated your feedback to create a new app resource management tool to bulk import, preview, and manage resources for your project. Lastly, we are shipping an updated Android Emulator that takes less system resources, and also supports the Android Q Beta. Overall, these features are designed to make you more productive in your day-to-day app development workflow. Alongside the stable release of Android Studio 3.4, we recently published in-depth blogs on how we are investigating & fixing a range of issues under the auspices of Project Marble. You should check them out as you download the latest update to Android Studio:

Project Marble: Apply Changes

Improving build speed in Android Studio

Android Emulator: Project Marble Improvements

Android Studio Project Marble: Lint Performance

The development work for Project Marble is still on-going, but Android Studio 3.4 incorporates productivity features and over 300 bug & stability enhancements that you do not want to miss. Watch and read below for some of the notable changes and enhancements that you will find in Android Studio 3.4. Develop

Resource Manager - We have heard from you that asset management and navigation can be clunky and tedious in Android Studio, especially as your app grows in complexity. The resource manager is a new tool to visualize the drawables, colors, and layouts across your app project in a consolidated view. In addition to visualization, the panel supports drag & drop bulk asset import, and, by popular request, bulk SVG to VectorDrawable conversion. These accelerators will hopefully help manage assets you get from a design team, or simply help you have a more organized view of project assets. Learn more.

Resource Manager

Import Intentions - As you work with new Jetpack and Firebase libraries, Android Studio 3.4 will recognize common classes in these libraries and suggest, via code intentions, adding the required import statement and library dependency to your Gradle project files. This optimization can be a time saver since it keeps you in the context of your code. Moreover, since Jetpack libraries are modularized, Android Studio can find the exact library or minimum set of libraries required to use a new Jetpack class.

Jetpack Import Intentions

Layout Editor Properties Panel - To improve product refinement and polish we refreshed the Layout Editor Properties panel. Now we just have one single pane, with collapsible sections for properties. Additionally, errors and warnings have their own highlight color, we have a resource binding control for each property, and we have an updated color picker.

Layout Editor Properties Panel

IntelliJ Platform Update - Android Studio 3.4 includes Intellij 2018.3.4. This update has a wide range of improvements from support for multi-line TODOs to an updated search everywhere feature. Learn more.

Build

Project Structure Dialog - A long standing request from many developers is to have a user interface front end to manage Gradle project files. We have more plans for this area, but Android Studio 3.4 includes the next phase of improvement in the Product Structure Dialog (PSD). The new PSD allows you to see and add dependencies to your project at a module level. Additionally, the new PSD displays build variables, suggestions to improve your build file configuration, and more! Although the latest Gradle plugin v3.4 also has improvements, you do not have to upgrade your Gradle plugin version number to take advantage of the new PSD. Learn more.

Project Structure Dialogue

R8 by Default - Almost two years ago we previewed R8 as the replacement for Proguard. R8 code shrinking helps reduce the size of your APK by getting rid of unused code and resources as well as making your actual code take less space. Additionally, in comparison to Proguard, R8 combines shrinking, desugaring and dexing operations into one step, which ends up to be a more efficient approach for Android apps. After additional validation and testing last year, R8 is now the default code shinker for new projects created with Android Studio 3.4 and for projects using Android Gradle plugin 3.4 and higher. Learn more.

Test

Android Emulator Skin updates & Android Q Beta Emulator System Image - Inside of Android Studio 3.4 we released the latest Google Pixel 3 & Google Pixel 3 XL device skins. Also with this release, you can also download Android Q Beta emulator system images for app testing on Android Q. Please note that we do recommend running the canary version of Android Studio and the emulator to get the latest compatibility changes during the Android Q Beta program.

Android Emulator - Pixel 3 XL Emulator Skin To recap, Android Studio 3.4 includes these new enhancements & features: Develop

Resource Manager

Import Intentions

Layout Editor Properties Panel

IntelliJ 2018.3.4 Platform Update

Build

Project Structure Dialog

R8 by Default

Test

Emulator Device Skins

Android Q Beta Emulator System Image Support

Check out the Android Studio release notes, Android Gradle plugin release notes, and the Android Emulator release notes for more details. Getting Started Download Download the latest version of Android Studio 3.4 from the download page. If you are using a previous release of Android Studio, you can simply update to the latest version of Android Studio. If you want to maintain a stable version of Android Studio, you can run the stable release version and canary release versions of Android Studio at the same time. Learn more. To use the mentioned Android Emulator features make sure you are running at least Android Emulator v28.0.22 downloaded via the Android Studio SDK Manager. We appreciate any feedback on things you like, and issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Follow us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on Twitter and on Medium.

Android Studio 3.3

14 January 2019

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager

We are excited to kick off the new year with a stable release of Android Studio 3.3 focused on refinement and quality. You can download it today from developer.android.com/studio. Based on the feedback from many of you, we have taken a step back from large features to focus on our quality fundamentals. The goal is to ensure Android Studio continues to help you stay productive in making great apps for Android. Since the last stable release, Android Studio 3.3 addresses over 200 user- reported bugs. This release also includes official support for Navigation Editor, improved incremental Java compilation when using annotation processors, C++ code lint inspections, an updated new project wizard, and usability fixes for each of the performance profilers. In addition, saving snapshots on exit for the Android emulator is 8x faster. Android Studio 3.3 kicks off the broader quality focus area for the year, which we call Project Marble. Announced at the Android Developer Summit in November 2018, Project Marble is the Android Studio team's focus on making the fundamental features and flows of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rock-solid, along with refining and polishing the user-facing features that matter to you in your day-to-day app development workflows. In Project Marble, we are specifically looking at reducing the number of crashes, hangs, memory leaks, and user-impacting bugs. We are also investing in our measurement infrastructure to prevent these issues from occurring. Stay tuned for more updates and details as we progress on this initiative. This release of Android Studio is a solid milestone for the product. If you want the latest in feature refinement and quality, then download Android Studio 3.3 today on the stable release channel. Watch and read below for some of the notable changes and enhancements that you will find in Android Studio 3.3. Develop

Navigation Editor - The navigation editor is a visual editor which allows you to construct XML resources that support using the new Jetpack Navigation Component. With the Navigation Editor and the Navigation Component, you can build predictable interactions between the screens and content areas of your app. This editor was previewed in an earlier Android Studio release, but based on your feedback we held this feature to improve the quality of the feature. Thank you to the developers who gave us feedback. Learn more.

Navigation Editor

IntelliJ Platform Update - Android Studio 3.3 includes Intellij 2018.2.2. This is a significant platform release from Jetbrains, with new previews for the code editor, updated icons, MacBook Touch Bar support, plus enhanced version control integrations. Learn more.

Kotlin Update - This release of Android Studio bundles Kotlin 1.3.11, with support for Kotlin coroutines and contracts plus IDE support for the recommend Kotlin coding style. Learn more.

Clang-Tidy Support for C++ - Android Studio now has support for Clang-Tidy for C++ static code analysis. Similar to the current lint support for Java and Kotlin in Android Studio, Clang-Tidy helps those who have C++ in their Android app identify common coding errors and bugs. Enable the inspection by going to Settings → Editor → Inspections (Preference → Editor → Inspections for MacOS) . Learn more.

Clang-Tidy Code Inspection Settings

New Project Wizard update - To support the range of device types, programming languages, and new frameworks, we have updated the New Project Wizard for Android Studio. You can access the same project templates in a more streamlined user experience.

New Project Wizard

Delete Unused IDE Directories - To help you upgrade to the newest version of Android Studio, we have added a new feature to help clean up unused settings & cache directories. Past versions of Android Studio left these old directories that were hard to find and remove on your hard drive. When you first run Android Studio 3.3 and higher, the new dialog suggests directories that you can safely remove from past installations of Android Studio.

Delete Unused Directories Dialogue

IDE User Feedback - To help us to create a better product, we have started to include in-product sentiment buttons for quick feedback. For those who opt-in to sharing usage data, feel free to click on the icon that suits your sentiment while using Android Studio. To opt-in to give in-product feedback go to Settings → Appearance & Behavior → System Settings → Data Sharing ( Preferences → Appearance & Behavior → System Settings → Data Sharing for MacOS).

IDE User Feedback Build

Improved incremental Java compilation when using annotation processor - This update decreases build time by improving support for incremental Java compilation when using annotation processors. The optimization requires Android Gradle plugin 3.3.0 or higher. Learn more.

Lazy task configuration - The plugin uses Gradle's new task creation API to avoid initializing and configuring tasks that are not required to complete the current build (or tasks not on the execution task graph). For example, if you have multiple build variants, such as "release" and "debug" build variants, and you're building the "debug" version of your app, the plugin avoids initializing and configuring tasks for the "release" version of your app. Learn more.

Single-variant project sync - Along with build speed, project sync speed can be a development bottleneck to for those who have large app projects with multiple build variants. In this version of the IDE, you can you can limit syncing to only the active build variant. In order for this optimization to work, your project needs to use Android Gradle plugin 3.3.0 or higher. You can enable this option under the Experimental preferences in Android Studio 3.3.

Single-Variant Project Sync

Android App Bundles now support Instant Apps - You can now build and deploy Google Play Instant experiences from a single Android Studio project, and include them in a single Android App Bundle. Launched last year, the Android App Bundle is the new standard Android app publishing format that you can build with Android Studio. This update streamlines and unifies the build artifacts that you upload to Google Play. Learn more.

Test

Multiple Emulator AVD instances - Android Emulator 28.0 now supports the ability to launch multiple instances of the same Android Virtual Device (AVD). Each instance of the AVD uses a minimal set of system resources. For those developers with continuous integration (CI) testing environments, this can be a convenient way to run tests in parallel off one AVD configuration. On the command line run the following commands:

$./emulator -avd <avdname> -read-only &
$./emulator -avd <avdname> -read-only &

Android Emulator: Multiple AVD Launch

Android 9 Pie Emulator System Images & Wi-Fi P2P - Alongside Android Studio 3.3, you can also download Android 9 system images for your emulator for your app testing. The Google Play emulator system images not only passe the official Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS), they also include support for Peer-to-Peer Wi-Fi direct connections between two emulators. To start using this feature, launch the emulator (v28.0.22 or higher) via the command line and ensure the two emulators share the same Wi-Fi server and client port command line arguments.

$./emulator @<server-avd-name> -wifi-server-port 9999
$./emulator @<client-avd-name> -wifi-client-port 9999

Android Emulator: Wi-Fi P2P Setup

Emulator Snapshot Save Speed - We have heard from you that you enjoy using snapshots and quickboot, but felt the time taken to close the emulator and Quickboot save a snapshot was slow. To solve this, we optimized the way snapshots are saved and managed, using a mapped file to save guest RAM. From aggregate metrics, we found that this optimization led to driving down the average quickboot save time from the last stable version to now from 27 seconds down to 3 seconds — a 8x improvement. Learn more about this enhancement and other recent improvements to the emulator here.

Optimize

Profiler performance improvements - Based on your feedback, we have dramatically improved Android Studio performance while using the profilers in this release. We've seen improvements on average of 2x in frame rates in our local tests. Please continue to provide feedback, especially if you continue to see performance issues.

Memory Profiler allocation tracking options - In previous releases, we have heard from you that, in some cases, your app performs significantly worse while profiling with the default settings. To address this, we have changed the default Memory Profiler capture mode on Android 8.0 Oreo (API level 26) and higher devices to sample for allocations periodically. You can adjust this setting in the Allocation Tracking dropdown menu. By default, we also now temporarily turn off allocation tracking during CPU recordings to minimize the impact on recording results. Learn more.

Memory Profiler: Allocation Tracking Options

Network Profiler formatted text - The Network profiler in Android Studio 3.3 now formats common text types found in network payloads by default, including HTML, XML and JSON. You can toggle between formatted and raw text by navigating to either the Response or Request tab, and click on the View Parsed / View Source link. Learn more.

Network Profiler: Formatted Text

CPU Profiler frame rendering data - The CPU Profiler now shows you the render time for each frame on the main UI thread and Render Thread when you record with Trace System Calls. If you are trying to investigate and understand the bottlenecks or the source of UI jank in your app, this data can come in handy to see where you can improve your app performance. Learn more.

CPU Profiler: Frame Rendering Data To recap, Android Studio 3.3 includes these new enhancements & features: Develop

Navigation Editor

IntelliJ 2018.2.2 Platform Update

Kotlin 1.3.11 Update

Clang-Tidy Support for C++

New Project Wizard update

Delete Unused IDE Directories

IDE User Feedback

Build

Improved incremental Java compilation when using annotation processors

Lazy task configuration:

Single-variant project sync

Android App Bundles now supports Instant Apps

Test

Multiple Emulator AVD instance Launch

Android 9 Pie - Emulator System Images

Emulator Snapshot Save Speed Improvement

Optimize

Profiler Performance Improvements

Memory Profiler: Allocation Tracking Options

Network Profiler: Formatted Text

CPU Profiler: Frame Rendering Data

Check out the Android Studio release notes, Android Gradle plugin release notes, and the Android Emulator release notes for more details. Getting Started Download Download the latest version of Android Studio 3.3 from the download page. If you are using a previous release of Android Studio, you can simply update to the latest version of Android Studio as well. If you want to maintain a stable version of Android Studio, you can run the stable release version and canary release versions of Android Studio at the same time. Learn more. To use the mentioned Android Emulator features make sure you are running at least Android Emulator v28.0.22 downloaded via the Android Studio SDK Manager. We appreciate any feedback on things you like, and issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Follow us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on Twitter and on Medium.

Android Studio 3.2 Canary

08 May 2018

Today at Google I/O 2018 we announced the latest preview of Android Studio 3.2 which includes an exciting set of features that support the Android P Developer Preview, the new Android App Bundle, and Android Jetpack. Download Android Studio 3.2 from our canary release channel today to explore one of the most feature rich releases of the year. Android Jetpack is a set of libraries, developer tools and architectural guidance to help make it quick and easy to build great Android apps. It provides common infrastructure code so you can focus on what makes your app unique. Android Studio 3.2 includes a wide set of tools that support Jetpack from a visual Navigation Editor that uses the Navigation API, templates for Android Slices APIs, to refactoring tools to migrate to the new Android support libraries in Jetpack — AndroidX. The canary 14 release of Android Studio 3.2 also supports the new Android app model that is the evolution of the APK format, the Android App Bundle. With no code changes, Android Studio 3.2 will help you create a new Android App Bundle and have it ready for publishing on Google Play. There are 20 major features in this release of Android Studio spanning from ultra fast Android Emulator Snapshots, Sample Data in the Layout Editor, to a brand new Energy Profiler to measure battery impact of your app. If any of these features sound interesting, download the preview of Android Studio 3.2 today. To see these features demoed in action and to get a sneak peak at other features we are working on, check out the Google I/O 2018 session - What's new in Android Development Tools. What’s new in Android Development Tools - Google I/O 2018Below is a full list of new features in Android Studio 3.2, organized by key developer flows. Develop

Navigation Editor - As a part of Jetpack, Android Studio 3.2 features a new way to design the navigational structure between the screens of your app. The navigation editor is a visual editor which allows you to construct XML resources that support using the new Navigation Component in Jetpack.

Navigation Editor

AndroidX Refactoring Support - One of the components of Jetpack is rethinking and refactoring the Android Support Libraries to a new Android extension library (AndroidX) namespace. As a part of the early preview of the AndroidX, Android Studio 3.2 helps you through this migration with a new refactoring action. To use the feature, navigate to: Refactor → Refactor to AndroidX. As an additional enhancement to the refactoring process, if you have any maven dependencies that have not migrated to the AndroidX namespace, the Android Studio build system will automatically convert those project dependencies as well. You can manually control the conversion process by toggling the android.enableJetifier = true flag in your gradle.properties file. While the refactoring action supports common project configurations, we recommend that you save a backup of your project before you refactor. Learn more.

AndroidX Refactoring Support

Sample Data - Many Android layouts have runtime data that can make it difficult to visualize the look and feel of a layout during the design stage of app development. Sample Data in the Layout Editor allows you to use placeholder data to aid in the design of your app. From RecyclerView, ImageView to TextView, you can add built-in sample data to populate these views via a popup-window in the Layout Editor. To try out the feature, add a RecyclerView to a new layout, and then click on the new tools design-time attributes icon and choose a selection out of the carousel of sample data templates.

Design Time Sample Data

Material Design Update - Material Design continues to evolve not only as a design system but also in implementation on Android. When you start migrating from the Android Design support library to the new MaterialComponents app theme and library, Android Studio 3.2 will offer you access to new and updated widgets such as BottomAppBar, buttons, cards, text fields, new font styles and more. Learn more.

New Material Design Components

Slices support - Slices is a new way to embed portions of your app content in other user interface surfaces in the Android operating system. Slices is backwards compatible to Android 4.4 KitKat (API 19) and will enable you to surface app content in Google Search suggestions. Android Studio 3.2 has a built in template to help you extend your app with the new Slice Provider APIs as well as new lint checks to ensure that you're following best practices when constructing the slices. To get started right-click on a project folder, and navigate to New→ Other→ Slice Provider. Learn how to test your slice interactions by checking out the getting started guide.

Slices Provider Template

CMakeList Editing Support - Android Studio supports CMake build scripts for your app's C/C++ code. With this release of Android Studio 3.2, code completion and syntax highlighting now works on common CMakeList commands.

CMakeList Code Completion

What's New Assistant - Android Studio 3.2 has a new assistant panel that opens automatically after an update to inform you about the latest changes to the IDE. You can also open the panel by navigating to Help → What's New in Android Studio.

What's New Assistant

IntelliJ Platform Update - Android Studio 3.2 includes the IntelliJ 2018.1 platform release, which has many new features such as data flow analysis, partial Git commits support, and a ton of new code analysis enhancements. Learn more.

Build

Android App Bundle- The Android App Bundle is the new app publishing format designed to help you deliver smaller APKs to your users. Google Play has a new Dynamic Delivery platform that accepts your Android App Bundle, and delivers only the APKs that you need on a specific device. Android Studio 3.2 enables you to create and test an Android App Bundle. As long as you are running the latest Android Gradle plugin (com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.2.0-alpha14), you can rebuild your code as an app bundle and get the benefit of smaller APKs based on language, screen density, and ABIs with no changes to your app code. To get started, navigate to Build → Build Bundle / APK or Build → Generate Signed Bundle / APK Learn more.

Build Android App Bundle

D8 Desugaring - In some cases, new Java Language features require new bytecodes and language APIs, however older Android devices may not support these features. Desugaring allows you to use these features on older devices by replacing new bytecodes and language APIs with older ones during the build process. Desugaring was initially introduced with Android Studio 3.0 as a separate tool, and in Android Studio 3.1, we integrated the desugaring step into the D8 tool as an experimental feature, reducing overall build time. Now D8 desugaring is turned on by default for Android Studio 3.2. You can you can now use most of the latest language changes while targeting older devices.

R8 Optimizer - During the app build process, Android Studio historically used ProGuard to optimize and shrink Java language bytecode. Starting with Android Studio 3.2, we are starting the transition to use R8 as a replacement to ProGuard. To experiment with R8, add android.enableR8=true to your gradle.properties file. R8 is still experimental, so we do not recommend publishing your app using R8 yet. Learn more.

Enable R8 in Android Studio Test

Emulator Snapshots - With Quickboot in the Android Emulator we enabled you to launch the emulator in under 6 seconds. With Android Studio 3.2 we have extended this feature to enable you to create snapshots at any emulator state and start them iun under 2 seconds. When testing and developing your app, you can pre-configure an Android Virtual Device (AVD) snapshot with the presets, apps, data and settings that you want in-place, and repeatedly go back to the same snapshot. Snapshots load in under 2 seconds and you can launch to specific snapshots from the Android Emulator Extended Controls panel, the command-line ( ./adb emu avd snapshot load snap_2018-04-29_00-01-12 ) or from within Android Studio.

Android Emulator Snapshots

Screen Record in Android Emulator - Normally creating a screen recording of your app screen would only work for Android 4.4 KitKat (API 19) and above with no audio, with limited Android Emulator support. With the latest Android Emulator (v27.3+), you can take screen recordings on any API level with audio. Plus, there is a built-in conversion to output to GIF and WebM. You can trigger the new screen record feature via the Android Emulator Extended Controls panel, command line ( ./adb emu screenrecord start --time-limit 10 /sample_video.webm ), and from Android Studio.

Screen record in Android Emulator

Virtual Scene Camera for Android Emulator - Developing and testing apps with ARCore is now even easier with the new Virtual Scene camera, which allows you to iterate on your augmented reality (AR) experience within a virtual environment. The emulator is calibrated to work with ARCore APIs for AR apps and allows you to inject virtual scene bitmap images. The virtual scene camera can also be used as a regular HAL3 compatible camera. Open the built-in Android camera app inside the Android Emulator to get started. By default, the new virtual scene camera is the rear camera for new Android Virtual Devices created with Android Studio 3.2. Learn more.

Virtual Scene Camera in Android Emulator

ADB Connection Assistant - To help troubleshoot your Android device connections via ADB, Android Studio 3.2 has a new assistant. The ADB Connection Assistant walks you through common troubleshooting steps to connect your Android device to your development machine. You can trigger the assistant from the Run Dialogue box or by navigating to Tools → Connection Assistant .

ADB Connection Assistant Optimize

Energy Profiler - Battery life is a key concern for many phone users, and your app may impact battery life more than you realize. The new Energy Profiler in the performance profiler suite can help you understand the energy impact of your app on an Android device. You can now visualize the estimated energy usage of system components, plus inspect background events that may contribute to battery drain. To use the energy profiler, ensure you are connected to an Android device or emulator running Android 8.0 Oreo (API 26) or higher. Learn more.

Energy Profiler

System Trace - The new System Trace feature in the CPU Profiler allows you to inspect how your app interacts with system resources in fine-grained detail. Inspect exact timings and durations of your thread states, visualize where your CPU bottlenecks are across all cores, and add custom trace events to analyze. To use system trace, start profiling your app, click into the CPU Profiler, and then choose the System Trace recording configuration. Learn more.

System Trace

Profiler Sessions - We now automatically save Profiler data as "sessions" to revisit and inspect later while you have Android Studio open. We've also added the ability to import and export your CPU recordings and heap dumps for later analysis or inspection with other tools.

Profiler Sessions

Automatic CPU Recording - You can now automatically record CPU activity using the Debug API. After you deploy your app to a device, the profiler automatically starts recording CPU activity when your app calls startMethodTracing(String tracePath), and stops recording when your app calls stopMethodTracing(). Similarly, you can also now automatically start recording CPU activity on app start-up by enabling this option in your run configuration.

JNI Reference Tracking - For those of you who have C/C++ code in your Android app, Android Studio 3.2 now allows you to inspect the memory allocations of your JNI code in the Memory Profiler. As long as you deploy your app to a device running Android 8.0 Oreo (API 26) and higher, you can drill down into the allocation call stack from your JNI reference. To use the feature, start a memory profiler session, and select the JNI Heap from the Live Allocation drop-down menu.

JNI Reference Tracking To recap, the latest canary of Android Studio 3.2 includes these new major features:

Develop

Navigation Editor
AndroidX Refactoring
Sample Data
Material Design Update
Android Slices
CMakeList editing
What's New Assistant
New Lint Checks
Intellij Platform Update

Build

Android App Bundle
D8 Desugaring
R8 Optimizer

Test

Android Emulator Snapshots
Screen Record in Android Emulator
Virtual Scene Android Emulator Camera
ADB Connection Assistant

Optimize

Energy Profiler
System Trace
Profiler Sessions
Automatic CPU Recording
JNI Reference Tracking

Check out the preview release notes for more details. Getting StartedDownloadDownload the latest version of Android Studio 3.2 from the canary channel download page. If you are using a previous canary release of Android Studio, make sure you update to Android Studio Canary 14 or higher. If you want to maintain a stable version of Android Studio, you can run the stable release version and canary release versions of Android Studio at the same time. Learn more. To use the mentioned Android Emulator features make sure you are running at least Android Emulator v27.3+ downloaded via the Android Studio SDK Manager. We appreciate any early feedback on things you like, and issues or features you would like to see. Please note, to ensure we maintain product quality, the features you see in the canary channel may not be available in the next stable release channel until they are ready for stable usage. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Connect with us -- the Android Studio development team ‐ on our Google+ page or on Twitter.

Android Studio 3.5 Beta

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Android Studio 3.2 Canary

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