News

Android Studio Updated to Handle New Dev Tools, OS Features

• By David Ramel
• June 22, 2018

The Android team released Android Studio 3.2 (beta) to accommodate several new dev tools and OS features announced at the recent Google I/O conference.

Specifically, those features include:

• Android JetPack: New libraries, tools and architectural guidance, providing common infrastructure code so developers can focus on making an app unique.
• Android P Developer Preview: This features MessagingStyle and other notification updates; ImageDecoder for bitmaps and drawables; data cost sensitivity functionality in JobScheduler; display cutout APIs; multi-camera API and more.
• The new Android App Bundle format: A new way to package apps resulting in smaller APK package sizes to cover the wide variety of Android devices, obviating the need to refactor code to create such smaller apps by including only the needed resources.

Other new features include the capability to capture snapshots of an emulator in any state; an Energy Profiler to quickly gauge energy impacts on Android devices; and several other enhancements related to coding, building, testing and optimizing apps.

Jamal Eason, program manager, also highlighted the team's focus on improving quality, fixing more than 450 bugs and addressing memory leaks and performance issues, promising more for the future.

"As the usage of Android Studio has grown in the 3.5 years since version 1.0, we have also become increasingly obsessed with quality," Eason said in a blog post yesterday (June 21). "We continue to invest in quality because we know that millions of app developers spend almost everyday in Android Studio and need a reliable set of tools. Stability, build times, and other quality work will be the primary focus for our next release once we finish Android Studio 3.2."

The new update arrived about three months after Android Studio 3.1, which featured enhanced Kotlin support, smaller builds, recent IntelliJ platform updates and more.