Here is a big one, Android Studio 3.1 is officially launched and available to download. The major agenda of this release is to surge the quality and boost the productivity. Apart from the quality amendments, there are certain new features that are added which as an Android app development company you must integrate into your development process. The highlighting features of this release are improvements and advancements for C++ and Kotlin developers and also for the database users of SQLite.
One of the highlighting updates is for the kotlin as from now on, quality checks for Lint code can be run from the command line along with the IDE. For making the most out of Lint advanced feature, developers are under the obligation to open up an Android studio project and have to make use of the command line for running gradlew lint.
Here are some of the eye-catching additions to the Android Studio 3.1:
- There is an update in the network profiler to keep a track of the network traffic. Network thread view is installed for checking multithreaded traffic while the network request tab manages the network requests.
- To enable quick boot function, finer-grained controls are enabled which allows the resumption of Android emulator session in a time period lesser than 6 seconds.
- The device emulator is now updated to work in a frameless mode to make the app testing enabled even with the display of 18.9-inch display cutout API of Android P.
- The build status and errors will be shown in a tree view with an updated build output window. Legacy gradle built output is also queued with this window.
- The recent release includes IntelliJ idea 3.3 platform which supports Kotlin and SVG image preview as well.
- D8 dexer is set as the default dex compiler for the software builds which replaced the legacy DX compiler. It is basically compilation step making the size of the app small which makes debugging accurate helping in uploading faster builds.
What’s in the previous version Android 3.0?
The previous version officially added Kotlin as the official language for developing Android apps along with the Java 8 support. Apart from Kotlin, here are the other things it offered.
- App testing can be done with Google play with Emulator system images for Android Oreo.
- Now, there is support for Android things conjoined device platform by templates in the new project wizard and new module wizard.
- Downloadable and custom apps using XML can be used for the mobile apps which are targeting to support the Android Oreo.
- Instant apps features which are entirely the native Android apps not in the need of the user installer can now be added to the projects.
- For eradicating the performance issues, a suite of tools named Android Profiler is added.
- APK analyzer with additional enchantments has been added to optimize the size of APK files.
Support was granted for the JetBrains IntelliJ with abilities like enhanced version search control and Java 8 refactoring. - For making the updates rapid and smaller, instead of using Android SDK manager, maven repository is used for hunting updates to dependencies in the Android library Firebase maven and Google play services.
If you have been using the previous version till now, update yourself by downloading the newer version for Android app development. You have seen the benefits you get with both the older and newer versions. Weigh them and get equipped with the latest trends in the Android world.
