The Android development team has announced the latest stable release of its IDE for building Android apps, Android Studio.
This update aims to enhance app performance and battery life, facilitate easier application upgrades to the latest Android version, and speed up development using Jetpack Compose. The release, known as Android Studio Hedgehog, is designed to boost developer productivity, according to the company in a blog post.
The App Quality Insights feature now incorporates Android vitals data from Google Play Console in addition to Firebase Crashlytics SDK. This enhancement allows users to analyze crash reports for any app published on the Google Play Store without additional instrumentation.
Within the App Quality Insights tool window, users can view, filter, and address Android vitals issues, gaining insights into crashes and seamlessly navigating from stack trace to code for quicker issue resolution.
The new Power Profiler in Android provides detailed insights into power consumption on devices by segmenting information into “Power Rails.” Unlike the previous Energy Profiler, the Power Profiler directly measures power consumption, allowing for a more accurate understanding of the correlation between power usage and app actions.
This feature enables developers to identify and address power consumption issues by conducting A/B tests to compare different algorithms, features, or app versions. Optimizing apps for lower power consumption not only enhances battery and thermal performance but also improves the overall user experience. Power Rails data is accessible on Pixel 6+ devices running Android 10 and above.
Also, the SDK Upgrade Assistant is designed to assist developers in upgrading targetSdkVersion, offering a user-friendly, step-by-step wizard flow within Android Studio Hedgehog. This tool streamlines the process by pulling documentation directly into the integrated development environment (IDE), minimizing time and effort.
Hedgehog introduces support for upgrading projects to Android 14 (API Level 34) and includes enhanced relevance filters to eliminate unnecessary steps. The upgrade assistant can precisely identify code sections where changes are required, further simplifying the upgrade process.
In addition, in this version the IntelliJ platform has been upgraded to version 2023.1.
Additional updates include UI improvements, device mirroring, an embedded layout inspector, and more.
