Gradle basically gets virtual fleet management
Android Studio is back with a new stable update, the fourth major one since the 2021 revamp that turned the progression of version numbers into a series of animals in alphabetical order. As such, we’re looking at ‘D’ for ‘Dolphin,’ and a whole bunch of improvements to the workflows for Wear OS development and Jetpack Compose.
With Android Studio Dolphin (2021.3.1) comes the IntelliJ 2021.3 update which includes a beta of IntelliJ’s remote development platform, all-tabs font sizing, and more Markdown support among many other things. If you use virtual devices through Gradle, that has also been improved to let developers program and coordinate their virtual devices to be able to test to order.
If you have animations with updateTransition and AnimatedVisibility, you can jog through keyframes or the whole timeline with Jetpack Compose’s new Animation Preview inspector. And if you’re generating preview screens with @Preview on a regular basis, you’re now able to define an annotation class that will automatically generate those previews without having to paste in those eight characters all the time. Finally, the Layout Inspector now includes a handy recomposition counter for when you suspect your interface is refreshing a little too quickly.
Wear OS 3 is still coming (despite what you can get from Samsung with its Galaxy Watches), so Android Studio is still catching up to devs’ needs here. New this time, we’ve got a pairing assistant that will help you pair a physical phone to a virtual watch without ADB. If you’re running that watch in emulation, the toolbar’s been updated with form-appropriate actions such as pressing the side buttons or a full-screen palm cover. And if you’ve got an app with complex complications, there are new run/debug configurations you can execute to work out the kinks before pushing an update live.
More details on Dolphin can be found in the video above and through the Android Developers Blog.
