Jamal Eason, Android Product Manager
Have you ever wished Android Studio could be faster, better, and more efficient? If so, download the latest Android Studio 3.5 now! You will experience the most stable version of Android Studio ever. Over the past eight months, the Android Studio team has put new features on the back burner to focus on improving the Studio product so that you can enjoy a faster daily development experience! We called this work Project Marble. The plan focuses on the three core areas of system health, feature optimization, and bug fixing to build powerful and stable base features and flows in Android Studio and Android emulator. We will integrate the feedback we receive directly into Project Marble. Please continue to send us your feedback and share your thoughts and feelings.
In addition to memory and performance, the team spent a lot of time optimizing and fixing several core features for developers. For example, we examined the application deployment flow on the device, completely refactored Instant Run, and developed a more reliable and trusted alternative, Apply Changes. With the introduction of Apply Changes, we no longer rewrite your APK files at build time, but use runtime instrumentation to redefine classes at runtime. If you want to quickly edit code and see code changes, get started and give Android Studio 3.5 a try.
Finally, we fixed several bugs in Android Studio 3.5 during Project Marble. Thank you for submitting bug reports and actively interacting with the team on multiple social platforms, especially the 40 external contributors in the Android community, for their continued dedication to help the team submit and resolve important quality issues in Android Studio 3.5. While the Android Studio 3.5 stable release is a milestone for us and a symbol of the team’s hard work to improve IDE quality, our quality tuning efforts do not end with Project Marble. We hope that every developer who downloads and uses Android Studio 3.5 will enjoy the benefits of Project Marble, which will significantly improve the efficiency of Android app development with high-quality products and a new architecture.
We have introduced a number of quality changes in Android Studio 3.5. Please refer to Android Studio 3.5 Beta Now Available or the Android Studio release notes for a full list of changes. Of course, you can also read this article or watch the video below to get a quick look at some of the important changes:
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Tencent Video link: v.qq.com/x/page/w091…
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Bilibili video link: www.bilibili.com/video/av657…
System health
System health improvements in Project Marble include memory performance, input and user interface freezing, build speed, CPU usage, and I/O performance. We designed new monitoring mechanisms for each of these points to more accurately identify problems during development, and process optimizations allowed the team to better analyze user feedback and gain insights from statistics and bug reports that developers voluntarily share.
While many of the optimizations for system health may not be as well known, there are a few notable changes, including:
Automatically recommends memory Settings
In Android Studio 3.5, the IDE recognizes when an application project needs more RAM on a machine with higher RAM capacity and notifies the developer to increase the memory heap size. Alternatively, you can adjust the Settings yourself under Appearance & Behavior → Memory Settings.
User Interface freezing
During the development of the Project Marble initiative, we observed significantly slower XML code editing in the IDE in our production analysis data. We optimized the XML input based on this data point, resulting in a significant performance improvement for Android Studio 3.5. As you can see in the following two figures, editing data-binding expressions with XML is significantly faster thanks to improved input latency.
Build speed
One of the most important changes we’ve taken to speed up Android Studio 3.5 builds is the addition of incremental build support for the top-level annotation processor, These processors include Glide, AndroidX Data Binding, Dagger, Realm, and Kotlin (KAPT). Incremental support can significantly improve build speed. For more, read Faster Builds in Android Studio.
Disk I/O file access speed
Many users of Android Studio use Microsoft’s Windows operating system. We found that disk I/O file access on Windows took significantly longer than on other platforms. After digging into the data, we found that some antivirus programs do not exclude Android Studio’s Build Output Folder from the scan scope by default. In Android Studio 3.5, once the system detects this situation, Studio will guide you through a popup to optimize the Settings.
Feature optimization
In addition to improving system health, we also re-examined some key user processes and fixed bugs and several issues that led to a poor user experience in areas such as data binding, layout, Chrome OS support and project upgrades, with application deployment flow being one of the key improvements.
Apply Changes
During the Project Marble Initiative, we removed Instant Run, then rebuilt and implemented a more practical alternative in Android Studio 3.5 called Apply Changes. Apply Changes uses platform-specific apis in Android Oreo and above to ensure reliable and consistent system behavior. Unlike the mechanism of Instant Run, changing the system configuration does not rewrite your APK files. To support this change, we refactored the entire deployment pipeline to increase deployment speed; At the same time, we’ve tweaked the Run and deploy buttons in the toolbar to give you a more streamlined development experience.
To summarize, Android Studio 3.5 fixes several hundred bugs and introduces several key changes to address the following core areas:
System health
- Memory Settings
- Memory usage Report
- Reduce the abnormal
- User Interface freezing
- Build speed
- IDE speed
- Lint Code Analysis
- I/O file access
- Simulator CPU Usage
Feature optimization
- Apply Changes
- Gradle synchronization
- Project update
- Layout editor
- Data binding
- Application deployment
- C + + improved
- Intellij 2019 platform upgrade
- Conditional delivery supported by dynamic features
- Emulator support for foldable devices and Google Pixel devices
- Chrome OS support
For more, see the Android Studio release notes, or read the deep learning column below related to Project Marble or watch the Google I/O session:
- Project Marble: Apply Changes: medium.com/androiddeve…
- Speed up builds in Android Studio: medium.com/androiddeve…
- Android Emulator: Project Marble Enhancements: medium.com/androiddeve…
- Android Studio Project Marble Plans: Lint Performance: medium.com/androiddeve…
- Android Studio Project Marble: Layout Editor: medium.com/androiddeve…
- Google I/O: Marble Project – What are the updates to Android development tools? www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rf…
Voluntary data sharing and feedback
Based on the feedback and metrics we received from developers, we determined what Android Studio would be appropriate for Project Marble and decided on specific optimizations and means to implement them. Developers can voluntarily check data sharing in Android Studio, and the collected data will help the team determine whether the product contains problems affecting all users. Based on this, the team can then prioritize feature development efforts to address the most troubling issues first. In order to get the best insights, we integrate many different feedback channels into our products, and metric data sharing is the most basic feedback tool. You can enable this feature in Android Studio using the following path: Preferences /Settings → Appearance & Behavior → Data Sharing.
Immediate experience
download
Go to the Download page to obtain Android Studio 3.5. If you are currently using an older version of Android Studio, simply upgrade.
To use the above Android emulator features, make sure you are running Android emulator V29.1.9 or higher that you downloaded through the Android Studio SDK Manager.
Thank you for continuing to come back and share your thoughts, suggestions and comments, or any new features you’d like to see. If you encounter any errors or problems, please submit a bug report or leave a comment in the comments section.
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