What’s New in Android Studio
3 min readMay 9, 2018
Google is making continuous improvements in Android studio to make developer life betters so instead of wasting time on gradle build they can focus on developing better apps.
In this year’s Google I/O 2018 it has also introduced many new features in android studio 3.2(currently in canary channel) that will be provided in upcoming months to developers.
Developments in 3.1 version(In stable release already)
- Kotlin lint checks
- D8 Compiler
- C++ profiler
- Network threading Profiler
- SQL Code editing
- Emulator Quick boot
Developments coming soon in 3.2(In canary channel)
- Android app bundle(.aab)-a new app format is available in 3.2 version to deploy customized apk to users using Google play’s dynamic delivery system.Studio will generate .aab file that will be uploaded on playstore and it will create many different versions of app based on chip architecture, screen size and locale. Newer customized apk for different devices have smaller download size.(We can still do these things using app split and some configuration changes in gradle, but now play console and studio will do these task automatically for you).
It will also enable dynamic feature to be included in app for specific devices using on demand installation.
We can also configure the bundle file.
- Improvements in Profiler-
1. Multiple profiling session available so we can compare results.
2. Systrace is available in profiler- It looks data from the kernel.
3. Thread view in network profiler, also showing request and responses similar to web browser.
4. Memory profiler can now show JNI references and allocation traces from j9 references.
5. A new Energy profiler is introduced to show battery usage,wakelocks - Emulator Improvements-
1.Snapshots to record and save emulator particular state and directly launch that state in emulator.Quickboot is basically one of the use case of this feature.
2.Screen recording is available now. - Android X Refactoring-Repackaging of all the support libraries and legacy code to Android X package, automatic refactoring is available in android studio(In Refractor tab) for migration of old code so don’t worry you don’t have to do all the refactoring task.
we can also configure this in gradle.properties file.
- Navigation library- A whole new experience managing screen routing(Similar to ios Storyboard Development ) . Now routing between app screens will be visually available while developing using navigation graph.We can change screen routing directly from navigation graph.We can add animations directly from navigation graph and also add deeplinks.
- Layout editor improvements -Design time helper tool is available to show sample data in layout view.Support for material theming is also available.
- D8/R8 dex compiler-D8 is default dex compiler now.R8 is new optimizer replacing proguard for code shrinking and optimizations.Currently R8 in experimental mode.
Excited for using all these features, you can download canary cahnnel update of android studio.Checkout more post from Google I/O 2018.
