Android Studio Flamingo, the latest stable release of the popular app development platform, has been unveiled with a plethora of new and improved features. The upgrade now includes Jetpack Compose and Material 3 templates, exciting new live editing capabilities for Compose UIs, and enhanced app inspection features. The new version of Android Studio, numbered as 2022.2.1, is accessible from developer.android.com and is based on JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA 2022.2 IDE.
One of the key updates in Android Studio Flamingo is the revamped UI tooling, which allows developers to preview themed app icons. The System UI Mode selector, available on the toolbar, enables users to switch wallpapers and see how themed app icons adapt to the different backgrounds. The Jetpack Compose UI toolkit now comes as the default option for new projects, encouraging developers to use its capabilities.
Another game-changing experimental feature in Flamingo is Live Edit, which lets developers push code modifications to a connected device or emulator, and subsequently watch the UI refresh in real-time. Flamingo also supports Compose composition tracing, empowering developers to keep track of Compose functions within the system tracing profiler and gauge rendering times.
Among other noteworthy features in Android Studio Flamingo are:
- The one-click automated profile-able build and run option that simplifies profiling non-debuggable builds that users will execute.
- The Build Analyzer now arranges tasks into convenient categories such as Manifest, Android Resources, Kotlin, and Dexing.
- Dynamic color can be incorporated into apps, and the new wallpaper attribute in the @Preview composable enables users to switch wallpapers and observe the UI's reactions to different backgrounds.
- Lint support enhancements allow SDK extensions to be scanned for and fixed.
- Network Inspector, by default, showcases all traffic data for the entire timeline.
- Layout Inspector automatically connects to the foreground process, eliminating the need for developers to attach it to the app.
Flamingo comes integrated with the Android Gradle 8.0 plugin for application builds, incorporating a number of breaking changes, including restrictions on altering values for various flags.
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