Soon after the release of Android Studio 1.6 to the stable channel, Google is showing off what a full version 2.0 will look like. 

At long last Google seems to be taking our complaints about the speed of the emulator seriously. Perhaps it is just because Microsoft has caused some embarrassment by offering a free Android emulator that is fast on x86 machines without any help from the Intel HAXM driver.

However, you can't get your hands on the new faster emulator just yet as it isn't part of the Android Studio 2.0 download. It does look fast in the video, but another issue is how long it takes to load which is not made clear.

It is claimed that the emulator is more than 10 times faster than the old emulator and even faster than a physical device for deployment. 

The emulator's UI has also been redesigned and you can now do things that used to need command line options in the UI. You can also drag and drop an apk directly into the emulator and make use of Google Play services. Also new is the ability to interactively resize the emulator.  

The second big new feature is "instant run". What this seems to do is keep track of the files that you have changed and only downloads the changes to the apk file in the emulator. In many cases the app can continue to run while the program files are upgraded. In most cases code changes can be viewed in one to two seconds. 

There isn't anything much you have to do to take advantage of Instant run other than enable it. The idea may be a simple one, but doing it correctly is difficult. There is a substantial list of changes that you can make to make to your code that will defeat instant running and a smaller list that requires a restart of the Activity. In the future the list of code changes that instant run supports will be increased. 

Even without instant run Google claims that build time has been improved and is now at least twice as fast. 

The second big new feature is a GPU profiler. You can use it to tune your games and other graphics-based apps by recording entire sessions and walking through the GL Framebuffer and textures.  

Other new features include an update to using IntelliJ 15, enhanced testing support and support for Google Search deep linking. 

More Information

Android Studio 2.0 Preview

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