The latest version of Android Studio, Bumblebee, is now available in a stable version, as is the latest release of the Android Gradle plugin (AGP). The developers say they've improved functionality across a broad area of the typical developer workflow, specifically, build and deploy, profiling and inspection, and design.

Android Studio is the official IDE for Android. It is based on Jetbrain's IntelliJ IDEA, and supports the same programming languages as IntelliJ with extensions for Android.

The improvements to the Bumblebee release start with a new Device Manager that replaces the AVD Manager. The new version adds new capabilities that the developers say make it easier to create and manage all of your local test devices. Specifically, you get a more flexible UI that supports being docked in the IDE, floating, or in a separate window, like you can with other Android Studio tool windows. This gives you easier access to your devices without obstructing other windows of the IDE.

There's also a Virtual tab for creating and working with virtual devices, and a Physical tab can be used to pair to a new device using ADB Wifi and see the details of each physical device. 

The Layout Inspector has also been improved with the ability to save snapshots of your running app’s layout hierarchy, so that they can be shared or used for later reference. Snapshots capture the data you would typically see when using the Layout Inspector, including a detailed 3D rendering of your layout, the component tree of your View, Compose, or hybrid layout, and detailed attributes for each component of your UI.

App inspection has been improved, with the Network Inspector now part of the App Inspection tool window, and a more powerful Background Task Inspector that can be used to inspect an app’s Jobs, Alarms, and Wakelocks, in addition to the existing support for inspecting Workers.

This release also adds the ability to run instrumented tests in Android Studio using Gradle. This has been achieved via introduced a new test runner for the Android Gradle plugin (AGP) 7.1.0 that Android Studio Bumblebee uses by default when running instrumentation tests. The new release also adds the ability to run tests for Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) projects from Android Studio Bumblebee.

Android Studio Bumblebee Edition is available now.

More Information

Android Studio Website

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