Building mobile apps for Android has just become easier with the recent release of Android Studio 3.5.
The newest version, said Google, improves the speed, & the time spent compiling code. Google’s team spent the last 8 months tweaking Android Studio & replacing their Instant Run Framework with Apply Changes, which they promise will greatly improve the speed & reliability when testing changes made while building an app.
Overall, Android Studio has always been slow & bulky, it’s also been very ‘heavy’ on memory, & developers needed a powerful device to run it. Now, at least, the platform will warn you if you need more RAM, so that you can increase memory. Also, this setting can be manually adjusted under the ‘Memory Settings’ tab, a very welcome change.
App compilation time, which in the past has been particularly slow, has now become faster due to 2 major changes:
- Incremental compilation of annotation processors, resulting in quicker build times
- Faster scanning of files by Windows Defender
All these changes have been made under the heading of ‘Project Marble’, which is the name given to the big ‘clean-up-and-improve’ effort conducted by the Google team, to ‘fix’ their primary IDE for mobile development — this release is the final version of this project. The team have effected 600 bug fixes, 50 memory leaks, & 20 IDE hangs.
Another area of focus has been to eliminate ‘freezing’—Android Studio has been known to freeze for a minute or more mid-build. Now developers should find this problem solved.
The Android Studio team has, additionally, improved XML typing latency issues, which is a big plus. Android Studio 3.5 is also Chrome OS compliant—meaning that it should run smoothly on Google’s latest operating system.
Google’s aim has been to improve the stability & quality of a product used by millions of developers worldwide.
Devs want to build in an environment that offers quick turnaround times, & Google is determined to provide them with a means to get their apps to market much faster without the ‘hair-pulling’ frustration of working with a tool that until now, caused endless headaches.
Most changes made to Android Studio have come about by discovering what the community of developers found lacking in the IDE, & working to improve these issues stage-by-stage, & they most certainly seem to have addressed the major drawbacks. Let’s hope that Android Studio 3.5 is going to make work much better for developers.
Image Credit: Google Android
