The latest version of Android Studio, Electric Eel, has been released with updates and new features in design, build & dependencies, emulators & devices, and IntelliJ.

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 headline improvements to this release are better emulators and ways to test apps on connected devices. You can now create a desktop emulator to test how an app behaves on devices such as Chromebooks to make sure the app handles user choices such as freeform resizing and being minimized. There's also an experimental resizable emulator that can be used to test an app for multiple form factors in a single emulator.

The new release also offers support for device mirroring. This is still at the experimental opt-in stage, but using it you can connect a device either wired or wireless, and it then shows up in the Running Devices panel. Once mirrored, you can interact with it using similar facilities to an emulator, including multi-touch, physical buttons, and device rotation. You can also drag and drop files onto the mirrored device.

This is the first version of Android Studio to support IntelliJ 2022.1, and as such it includes Dependency Analyzer for dependency management and conflict resolution, and a Notifications tool window.

Other improvements include automatic updating of Compose previews, and highlighting of which of your composables are recomposing in Layout inspector, making it possible to identify where in the application the most recent activity caused the highest changes in recomposition counts.

This latest release continues the theme of Modern Android Development (MAD) first highlighted in Studio Chipmunk Edition. When Mike James looked at Chipmunk, he wasn't impressed, saying the push for MAD was happening at the expense of making Studio a good tool to help produce simple run-of-the-mill apps, and without removing any of the original clutter of the XML approach to UI design. Mike's view then was that perhaps it's time to split Android Studio into Classic and MAD editions, and that argument is still a strong one.

Android Studio Electric Eel is available now.

More Information

Android Studio Website

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