The latest version of Android Studio, dubbed Iguana, brings several new features, including better integration with Crashlytics; Compose UI Check, a new tool to verify Compose UI design and behavior; improved rendering for Compose views; a wizard to create baseline profiles, and more.
Android Studio Iguana improves integration between Crashlytics and App Quality Insights by making it possible to navigate directly from a Crashlytics stack trace to the relevant code and to inspect Crashlytics crashes by grouping them based on the similarity of the corresponding stack traces.
Compose UI Check is a new tool aimed at helping developers build adaptive and accessible UIs in Jetpack Compose.
When you activate Compose UI Check mode, Android Studio automatically audits your Compose UI and check for adaptive and accessibility issues across different screen sizes, such as text stretched on large screens or low color contrast. The mode highlights issues found in different preview configurations and lists them in the problems panel.
Another improvement for Compose UI workflows is the new progressive rendering, which reduces render quality to make view rendering faster. According to Google, this enables scrolling through complex view layouts without lag and previewing more composables defined in the same file at the same time.
Android Studio Iguana makes it easier to create baseline profiles thanks to a new wizard that automates the process of setting up a Gradle task within a project to generate a file, the Baseline Profile, that contains hints for Android Runtime (ART) to optimize the use of AOT.
According to Google, using a Baseline Profile can improve execution speed by about 30% since the first launch. When not using a Baseline Profile, the same level of performance improvement is reached through the JIT compiler but it usually requires more time to optimize all code paths.
On the test automation front, Iguana now supports the Espresso Device API to simulate device configuration changes such as rotation and screen unfolding. This lets you test your app against them using a virtual device and in a more controlled setting, thus improving test result reliability. This is how you can simulate a device orientation change, for example, in a test method:
@Test
fun myRotationTest() {
...
// Sets the device to landscape orientation during test execution.
onDevice().setScreenOrientation(ScreenOrientation.LANDSCAPE)
...
}
As usual with each new Android Studio version, Google has integrated a newer version of the IntelliJ IDEA platform it is based on, IntelliJ IDEA 2023.2. This includes a new AI Assistant, which offers an integrated AI chat and can write documentation comments, suggest names, generate commit messages, and more; an improved performance profiler that can use in-editor hints to analyze code line by line to identify and resolve performance issues; and better support for pull request-based workflows on GitLab.
