Android Studio Flamingo has been released with improvements including better UI tools, new features that assist with inspecting your app, and IntelliJ updates.

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 main improvement in this release is better UI tools, starting with a change so Material templates now use Jetpack Compose and Material 3 by default as that is the latest recommended option for for new projects. An experimental change has also been made to Compose to enable live editing. This means you can iteratively build an app using Compose by pushing code changes directly to an attached device or emulator. When the app is saved, the UI updates in real time. Still live editing isn't the same as a drag-and-drop editor, which we have had for the XML layout system for a long time.

Work on the toolbar means the System UI Mode selector can be used to switch wallpapers and see how your themed app icons react to the chosen wallpaper, and there's a new wallpaper attribute for dynamic color that lets you switch wallpapers and see how your UI reacts to different wallpapers.

Build has also been updated so that Build Analyzer now groups tasks by categories such as Manifest, Android Resources, Kotlin, and Dexing, with categories sorted by duration. The aim is to make it more obvious which categories have the most impact on build time.

The Network Inspector has also been improved to perform traffic interception and show all traffic data for the full timeline by default. You can also create and manage rules that help test how your app behaves when encountering different responses such as status codes, and response headers and bodies.

Android Studio Flamingo includes the IntelliJ 2022.2 platform release, which comes with IDE performance improvements and  enhanced rendering performance on macOS thanks to the Metal API.

Android Studio Flamingo is available now.

• Mike James is the author of Android Programming in Kotlin: Starting With An App and Android Programming In Java: Starting With An App, 3nd Ed covering Android Studio 3.

More Information

Android Studio Website

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