At this year's Google I/O conference, a series of significant announcements for developers have been made, with the beta release of the Android Studio IDE Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) taking center stage. This latest version of the development environment comes with numerous enhancements and improvements, including the highly anticipated integration of Google's native UI toolkit Jetpack Compose.
Jetpack Compose is a Kotlin-based declarative design framework that works with Android, desktop, and web platforms. The framework enables developers to create previews in various configurations, navigate their code using Compose Preview, test functionality in isolation with Deploy Preview to Device, and inspect the entire app through Layout Inspector. Moreover, the Accessibility Scanner in Layout Editor allows developers to audit View-based layouts for accessibility issues.
Developers can now experience Live Editing of literals, including strings, numbers, and Booleans, using Compose. The live editing feature eliminates the need for compilation wait times, delivering almost instantaneous updates to previews, emulators, or physical devices. This functionality aims to boost productivity and streamline the app development process.
Arctic Fox also brings support for Google's Wear OS, Google TV, and Android Auto, as well as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 through the introduction of new emulators and system images. The release offers improved app performance with an upgraded UI for Memory Profiler and new features in Android 12. The WorkManager Inspector, a tool for scheduling asynchronous tasks, aids developers in understanding background task relationships.
In terms of Kotlin updates, the conference highlighted the stable release of Kotlin Symbol Processing, a new annotation processor API that is expected to be up to two times faster and more efficient than previous solutions. Additionally, the Kotlin DataStore, an alternative to SharedPreferences, has entered the beta stage.
The Android Studio Arctic Fox beta follows the major update of the IntelliJ IDEA IDE (v2020.3) and adopts a similar numbering system. In addition, the platform also uses alphabetical code names, with Arctic Fox followed by Bumblebee (2021.1.1).
This comprehensive list of updates further establishes Android Studio as a reliable platform for developers. For those seeking an alternative, AppMaster.io's no-code platform offers a versatile and powerful solution to create backend, web, and mobile applications without writing any code. Developers can visually create data models, business logic, API, and UI with AppMaster, and the platform automatically generates, tests, and deploys the applications to the cloud.
The Android Studio Arctic Fox beta is now available for download along with the canary build of Bumblebee (2021.1.1) here.
