The latest release of Android Studio, dubbed Hedgehog, is now stable. It includes IntelliJ 2023.1, new features for improving app performance, boosting developer productivity, and creating UI using Jetpack Compose.
IntelliJ 2023.1 brings a new overhauled UI, performance enhancements to Maven import, and faster project opening. It also provides a streamlined commit process thanks to background commit checks and several other upgrades and refinements.
To help developers improve the quality of their applications, Android Studio Hedgehog includes support for Android Vitals, which lets them access data about crashes without even instrumenting the apps. Developers can view, filter, and see crash insights from Google Play, and seamlessly display the crash stack trace in the IDE with just one click.
Additionally, the new Power Profiler can visualize how distinct tasks in an app correlate to power consumption, thus enabling running A/B tests to compare how different implementations differ in terms of power consumption, and so on. The UI of this new tool displays various "Power rails" to track power consumption in different subsystems of the phone, such as CPU, camera, cellular, display, and so on. Consumption data is shown as a time-based system trace that shows spikes and helps correlate them to the tasks currently executed on the device. It is important to note, however, that the tool only measures overall power consumption and is not able to differentiate, for example, if it is some app running in the background that requires more CPU usage.
On the developer experience front, Android Studio Hedgehog makes it easier for developers to upgrade their apps to Android 14 (API Level 34) by showing all required migration steps and pulling related documentation directly into the IDE. In some cases, the upgrade assistant will be able to tell developers exactly which parts of the code need to be modified.
To make it easier to solve issues related with an app's UI, Hedgehog supports device mirroring, which enables mirroring a physical device in the IDE to execute common actions such as interacting with the app, rotating the device, etc, as well as a new Embedded Layout Inspector which is a streamlined version of the layout inspector that runs inside the IDE using device mirroring instead of the emulator.
As a final note, Hedgehog improves integration with Jetpack Compose by introducing a Gallery Mode for UI preview and showing extended information when setting breakpoints into a composable function to help understand what may have caused unexpected recompositions.
