Android Studio 3.4, the latest version of Google’s IDE for building Android applications, is now available, building on the Project Marble effort to improve fundamental features and workflows. Along with performance improvements and bug fixes, Android Studio 3.4 features a streamlined UI for managing dependencies and build files, a new default code shrinker and obfuscator, a new app resource management tool, and a more efficient Android Emulator.
Where to download Android Studio
You can download Android Studio from the Android Studio web page.
Previous version: What’s new in Android Studio 3.3
New features in Android Studio 3.3 include:
- Alignment with Project Marble, an effort to solidify fundamental IDE capabilities and polish user-facing features by reducing the number of crashes, hangs, memory leaks, and user-impacting bugs.
- Improved incremental Java compilation when using annotation processors; as a result, build times are decreased. Note this optimization requires the Android Gradle 3.3.0 plugin or higher.
- For C++, Version 3.3 supports the Clang-tidy tool for C++ static code analysis.
- A navigation editor, previously previewed in the IDE, provides a visual mechanism to construct XML resources that support the new JetPack Navigation Component. The editor and this component enable building of predictable interactions between screens and content areas of an app.
- Kotlin 3.11 is bundled, with support for Kotlin coroutines.
- The updated project wizard supports a range of device types, languages, and frameworks.
- Help is provided for deleting unused settings and cache directories, to assist with IDE upgrades.
- Lazy task configuration is supported, via a plugin that uses the Gradle task creation API to avoid configuring tasks not needed to complete a build, or tasks not on the execution task graph.
- Single-project variant sync is offered, to limit syncing to the active build variant. The Android Gradle plugin 3.3.0 or higher is needed for this capability.
- Android App Bundles now support Instant Apps, with developers able to build Google Play Instant experiences from a single Android Studio project.
- Android Emulator 28.0 now supports the launching of multiple instances of the same Android virtual device (AVD). This can be a convenient way for developers using continuous integration to run tests in parallel off one AVD configuration.
- Developers can download Android 9 systems images for their emulator, for app testing.
- To improve emulator snapshot save speed, Version 3.3 optimizes the way snapshots are saved.
- IDE performance has been improved when profilers are being used.
- The default memory profiler capture mode has been changed for Android 8.0 and higher devices to sample for allocations periodically. This addresses an issue in which apps performed significantly worse while profiling with default settings. Also by default, allocation tracking is turned off temporarily during CPU recordings to minimize impact on recording results.
- The network profiler now formats common text types found in network payloads by default, including HTML, XML, and JSON.
- The CPU profiler now shows render time for each frame on the main UI and render thread when recording with trace system calls. This can help with investigating bottlenecks or the source of UI jank in an app.
- A product sentiment button enables quick feedback for the Android Studio team.
