Android Builders Weblog: Android Studio Electrical Eel

By Oliver Williams

January 23, 2023

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508

Posted by Paris Hsu, Product Supervisor, Android Developer

Android Studio Electrical Eel splash display screen

Right now, we’re ⚡️electrified⚡️ to announce the newest secure launch of the official IDE for constructing Android functions: Android Studio Electrical Eel (2022.1.1)!

This launch consists of updates and new options that cowl throughout design, construct & dependencies, emulators & units, and IntelliJ. Learn or watch under to study extra about how they can assist you extra productively construct apps, and obtain the newest secure model at this time to strive it out for your self!

Design

Compose Preview updates mechanically – In earlier variations of Android Studio, you needed to manually refresh Compose Previews after making adjustments. In Electrical Eel, Previews replace mechanically after you make suitable code adjustments in the identical file, permitting you to iterate in your UI quicker. In case your code change was incompatible, Previews will present a “Wants Rebuild” standing to point needing a full construct. When your code incorporates compilation errors throughout modifying, Previews are briefly paused, after which resumed once more when the errors are mounted.

Moving image of a screenshot of Compose Preview updating automatically

Compose Preview updates mechanically

Compose Preview machine spec – One other replace for Compose Preview is that you could now edit the machine parameter of the Preview annotation to specify the configuration of the machine. You’ll be able to select from reference units or create your individual, by which case autocomplete will enable you with what choices can be found and what values they settle for. This works collectively properly with multipreview annotations, which can be found since Dolphin.

Screenshot of Compose preview device spec

Compose Preview System Spec

Format Inspector recomposition rendering highlights: To make it simpler to rapidly see which of your composables are recomposing, Format inspector now highlights recomposition. This lets you determine the place within the utility the newest exercise brought on the best adjustments in recomposition counts. The UI parts with the newest adjustments are briefly overlaid with a colour. This makes it simple to trace down surprising or extreme recompositions occurring in your app. You’ll be able to study extra about utilizing the format inspector to debug recomposition in Jetpack Compose: Debugging Recomposition.

Moving image of screenshot showing Layout Inspector recomposition rendering highlights

Format Inspector recomposition rendering highlights

Visible Linting for Views: New for XML layouts, Visible linting now runs within the background to verify for points throughout completely different type elements, detecting issues reminiscent of overlapping or non-visible parts on a given machine configuration.

For instance, within the animated display screen seize under, you possibly can see that the format file has two validation issues: a TextView lined by an ImageView on sure display screen sizes and an ImageView, which is partially out-of-bounds in some configurations. Clicking on the issue within the Issues panel will open the Format Validation panel to see your layouts rendered for the assorted machine sizes and spotlight the configurations with the chosen difficulty.

Moving image of screenshot showing Visual Linting for Views

Visible Linting for Views

Common Issues Panel: We’ve got consolidated all the issues reported by numerous instruments inside Android Studio into the brand new Issues panel. This consists of visible linting, navigation, and Compose associated points.

Screenshot showing the universal problems panel

Common Issues Panel

Construct & Dependencies

Obtain impression in Construct Analyzer: The Construct Analyzer software supplies you perception into what occurs throughout your builds. This now features a abstract of any dependency downloads that occurred. You should utilize this data to find out the impression of downloads in your construct, and to identify issues reminiscent of downloads occurring throughout incremental builds.

The knowledge of the obtain impression is damaged down by repositories, so you possibly can see the place every dependency was downloaded from. You may also see if a repository takes a very long time to serve artifacts, or has a excessive variety of failed requests. If that’s the case, it’s best to think about eradicating the repository, if potential, or transferring it decrease in your repository configuration, in order that different repositories take precedence over it.

Moving image of Screenshot showing the build analyzer

Obtain impression in Construct Analyzer

Improve Assistant post-upgrade report and rollback help: The Improve Assistant that helps you improve your undertaking’s Android Gradle Plugin model additionally received extra useful in Electrical Eel. After performing a model improve, the assistant will try to sync your undertaking, and report whether or not it was profitable. It now additionally offers you a abstract of what steps have been executed. Furthermore, if the undertaking sync fails after the improve, you should utilize the brand new Revert button to undo the adjustments to your construct recordsdata.

Moving image of Screenshot showing Upgrade Assistant post-upgrade report and rollback support

Improve Assistant post-upgrade report and rollback help

SDK Index integration: We introduced Google Play SDK Index earlier this 12 months, which supplies you details about numerous SDKs that you could combine into your app. SDK builders can mark variations of their SDKs as outdated within the SDK index, and this data is now proven instantly in Android Studio.

SDK Index integration

Baseline Profile repair for App Bundles: Below sure circumstances Baseline Profiles might have been compressed when the app was constructed as an Android App Bundle. This resulted within the profile not being picked up when putting in the app regionally. On this native solely state of affairs, benchmark outcomes can be slower than anticipated. The bundletool model transport with Electrical Eel addresses and fixes this downside.

Examine

All-new Logcat: Logcat has been rewritten from the bottom as much as make it simpler to parse, question, and observe logs. The brand new Logcat UI has been obtainable to strive as an opt-in function in Dolphin, and it’s now enabled by default in Electrical Eel, together with quite a few quality-of-life and stability fixes. Some highlights embody higher formatting for logs, a wiser search subject with autocomplete help to filter for the logs you wish to see, skill to persist log output throughout app restarts, and choices to customise what’s displayed.

Logcat New UI

App High quality Insights window: The brand new App High quality Insights instruments allow you to browse and examine crash information from Firebase Crashlytics instantly in Android Studio with out having to leap forwards and backwards between the IDE and a browser.

The IDE shows your high points, which you’ll be able to filter to point out solely the newest crashes, or crashes from a particular model of your app. For every difficulty, you possibly can see the variety of affected customers and the stack hint, which lets you rapidly navigate to the place in your code the place the crash occurred. Furthermore, you’ll see gutter icons in your supply recordsdata, which point out elements of your code that present up in your app’s high crash stories. Merely click on on the hyperlink to navigate from the code to the crash report within the App High quality Insights window. To get began, learn the official documentation.

Moving image of Screenshot showing App Quality Insights window

App High quality Insights window

Emulators & units

New “Desktop” class & Desktop AVD: In Electrical Eel, you now have the choice to create a Desktop emulator. This allows you to take a look at how your app behaves on units reminiscent of Chromebooks. There are a handful of interactions which are completely different on these units that it’s best to take a look at along with your app. For instance, apps will be freeform resized or minimized, which your app ought to deal with gracefully.

Testing apps on new Desktop AVDs

Resizable Emulator (Experimental): The Resizable emulator helps you take a look at your app on completely different display screen sizes with out having to run a number of emulators. After creating and launching a resizable emulator, you should utilize the Show Mode menu to modify between completely different reference machine sizes and see how your app behaves.

Moving image of using the Resizable Emulator

Utilizing the Resizable Emulator

Bodily Gadgets Mirroring (Experimental, Decide-in): Now you can mirror your bodily machine to Android Studio and work together with it equally to the way you’d use an emulator. That is an opt-in function in Electrical Eel so that you could share suggestions with us. With a purpose to use it, you could first go to Choice > Experimental > System Mirroring to allow it. Then, join your bodily machine by ADB (both by wired or wi-fi), and it’ll present up within the Operating Gadgets panel. As soon as mirrored, you possibly can work together with it very similar to you’re used to with emulators, reminiscent of multi-touch, bodily buttons, and machine rotation. Mouse and keyboard occasions are forwarded, and you should utilize the controls on the toolbar to enter button presses, or to rotate the machine.

You may also drag and drop recordsdata onto the mirrored machine (similar to on an emulator). If the file is an APK, it is going to be put in, which will be actually helpful for rapidly testing a construct. For different file varieties, the file shall be copied to the machine’s Obtain folder.

Moving image of physical devices mirroring in Android Studio

Moving image of physical devices mirroring on Physical Device

Bodily Gadgets Mirroring (Android Studio and Bodily Deice)

IntelliJ

IntelliJ Platform Replace – Android Studio Electrical Eel (2022.1.1) consists of the IntelliJ 2022.1 platform launch, which has many new options reminiscent of Dependency Analyzer to facilitate dependency administration and battle decision and the Notifications software window that provides a brand new, streamlined approach to obtain notifications from the IDE. It additionally consists of quite a few different notable enhancements which are lined right here.

To recap, Android Studio Electrical Eel (2022.1.1) consists of these new enhancements & options: