What’s new in Android Studio Giraffe

4 min readJul 26, 2023

So finally the wait is over!!!

Android Studio Giraffe is now live this month (July 2023)

Here are some of the features that developers can now enjoy

Live Edit:

You can now edit composables in real time. In Android Studio Giraffe and higher it requires Jetpack Compose Runtime 1.3.0 or higher and AGP 8.1 or higher.

Live Edit is focused on UI- and UX-related code changes. Live Edit doesn’t support changes such as method signature updates, adding new methods, or class hierarchy changes.

New UI Theme:

Android Studio Giraffe Canary 2 introduces support for the new UI theme from IntelliJ.

To opt in this theme, go to Android Studio > Settings > Appearance & Behavior. The redesigned theme aims to reduce visual complexity, provide easier access to essential features, and disclose complex functionality as needed — resulting in a modern, cleaner look and feel.

Support for Grammatical Inflection API:

This new feature lets you personalize the UI for your users by adding translations inflected based on your user’s grammatical gender when required.

New Android SDK Upgrade Assistant:

Starting with Android Studio Giraffe, see the steps required to upgrade the targetSdkVersion, or the API level that your app targets, directly in the Studio IDE. The Android SDK Upgrade Assistant pulls documentation directly into its tool window, so you don't have to jump back and forth between your browser and the IDE.

For each migration step, it highlights the major breaking changes and how to address them.
It filters the full list of changes to only show steps relevant to your app.

To open the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant, go to Tools > Android SDK Upgrade Assistant. In the Assistant panel, select the API level that you want to upgrade to for guidance. For the best experience, you should upgrade targetSdkVersion values one level at a time.

New API support for Compose Animation Preview:

Compose Animation Preview now also supports animate*AsState, CrossFade, rememberInfiniteTransition, and AnimatedContent (in addition to updateTransition and AnimatedVisibility). To use these additional APIs with Compose Animation Preview, upgrade to Android Studio Giraffe Canary 3 and Compose 1.4.0-alpha04 or higher.

View and manage processes in the Device Explorer:

Android Studio Giraffe includes an updated Device Explorer, known as the Device File Explorer in previous versions of Android Studio. In the Device Explorer, files and related actions are located in the Files tab. In the new Processes tab, view a list of debuggable processes for the connected device.

Download info during sync

The Sync tool window now includes a summary of time spent downloading dependencies and a detailed view of downloads per repository. This view updates live as sync takes place. You can use this information to determine whether unexpected dependency downloads are negatively impacting your sync performance.

Download information is only available if your project uses Gradle version 7.3 or higher.