The latest version of Android official IDE, Android Studio 4.1, is now stable. Besides introducing a new database inspector, integrated emulator, and better TensorFlow Lite support, it improves integration with Dagger and fixes over 2,000 bugs.
Possibly the most conspicuous new feature in Android Studio 4.1 is support for TensorFlow Lite model import, which allows you to automatically generate binding classes from a model to simplify its use. At the moment only image classification and style transfer models are supported, but object detection, image segmentation, and text classification are on the roadmap. This new feature requires your TensorFlow model to have metadata. In addition, only models with input data of types DataType.UINT8 and DataType.FLOAT32 are supported.
Android Studio database inspector enables inspecting databases and tables in running apps that use either the Jetpack Room library or the Android platform version of SQLite. Changes made to database rows will immediately be reflected in your app UI. The tools supports custom SQL queries.
The main advantage of using the new integrated Android emulator is it enables to navigate quickly between the emulator window and the editor and make a better use of screen real estate. The integrated emulator provides only a handful of features, including rotating the device and taking a snapshot, so you could need to use the standalone version in some cases. The emulator itself has gained support for 5G emulation and for foldable devices.
As a final note regarding external tooling, Android Studio 4.1 also adds improved support to dependency navigation when using Dagger, a popular library for dependency injection, through new gutter actions and Find Usages support. For example, you can click on a gutter action icon associated to a method to jump to the definition of a type used in its body.
Android Studio 4.1 includes improved System Trace, which now gives you a real-time view of how your app is using system resources and in which thread. It also provides extended stats, including aggregate statistics for all occurrences of a specific event, data about thread state distribution, and more. Additionally, the Memory Profiler now includes a Native Memory Profiler for apps deployed to physical devices running Android 10 or later, which tracks object allocations/deallocations to keep track of system heap usage.
Android Studio 4.1 is available here.
