google I/o

Android Studio Electric Eel released

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Android Developers Blog:

Today, we are ⚡️electrified⚡️ to announce the latest stable release of the official IDE for building Android applications: Android Studio Electric Eel (2022.1.1)!

This release includes updates and new features that cover across design, build & dependencies, emulators & devices, and IntelliJ.

Design

  • Compose Preview updates automatically
  • Compose Preview device spec
  • Layout Inspector recomposition rendering highlights
  • Visual Linting
  • Universal Problems panel

Build & dependencies

  • Improved Sync performance with parallel project imports
  • Download impact in Build Analyzer
  • Upgrade Assistant post-upgrade report and rollback support
  • SDK Index integration
  • Baseline Profile fix for App Bundles

Emulators & devices

  • New “Desktop” category & Desktop AVD
  • Resizable Emulator (Experimental)
  • Physical Devices Mirroring (Experimental, Opt-in)

IntelliJ

  • IntelliJ Platform 2022.1 Update

It’s a new year, and now a new stable version of Android Studio. First announced in May last year at Google I/O 2022, Electric Eel brings a number of highly-anticipated changes for Android Developers working with Jetpack Compose such as automatic updates, and the new Layout Inspector that helps show where recompositions are being triggered. It has been in preview since I/O.

This will help developers – especially those learning Compose who might not yet understand its intricacies – when investigating problems related to excessive or unexpected recompositions occurring.

Google’s announcement today follows Apple’s own rollout of its next round of software betas for its products earlier in the week as teams come back from end of year holidays.

Google rolls out deep link dashboard on the Play Console

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Google has now rolled out a new dashboard allowing developers to monitor Android app deep links on the Play Console. The dashboard highlights any issues that are found with both Android App Links and custom URL schemes.

First announced at Google I/O this year, the dashboard alerts developers of any configuration issues by extracting deep link intent information from an app’s manifest file. The intent information from the manifest is also presented on the dashboard.

For App Links, Google goes one step further and verifies that the appropriate details have been added and made available in the assetlinks.json file which is hosted at <your-domain.com>/.well-known/assetlinks.json. This confirms domain ownership.

If any issues are identified, Google provides advice on how to resolve them.

Later this year, Google will also highlight important URLs that it suggests should be registered as deep links:

We’re very excited to share this first release of the deep links page with you, making it much easier to make sense of your setup and fix broken deep links. The next release, coming later this year, will also highlight important website URLs that aren’t yet configured as deep links, so that you don’t miss an opportunity to drive more quality traffic to your app.

The new dashboard is available now and resides in the Play Console within the Grow menu under Deep links.

Android Studio ‘Chipmunk’ released

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Ahead of Google I/O later this week the Android team are out with the latest stable release of Android Studio (2021.2.1), dubbed ‘Chipmunk’.

This one is a fairly modest release and it contains a bunch of useful but not earth-shattering features including a new window to preview Jetpack Compose animations and more jank information when profiling the CPU.

The launch screen has also been updated to feature a chipmunk after the release’s moniker.

It indicated by the version number, this release also shifts Android Studio onto the IntelliJ 2021.2 platform major release. This means you’ll get a bunch of new IntelliJ features as well, including project analysis and the new package search UI.

The full release notes can be found here.