Google has announced that the latest version of Android Studio, Hedgehog is now stable. The main changes are that the IntelliJ platform has been upgraded to 2023.1, with features designed to improve app performance and battery life, make it easier to upgrade applications to the latest Android version, and make it faster to develop using Jetpack Compose.

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 aimed at app performance start with the inclusion of Android vitals in App Quality Insights. This tool can be used to investigate crash reports for apps instrumented with the Firebase Crashlytics SDK, and it now also includes Android vitals data from Google Play Console. With Android vitals, you can see crash reports for any app you publish to the Google Play Store without requiring additional instrumentation in your app.

Another improvement is a new Power Profiler that shows how much power your app consumes on devices. The display splits the info into subsystems called "Power Rails", and the Android Studio team says this helps you visualize the correlation between power consumed and the actions occurring in your app. Unlike the Energy Profiler that this tool replaces, the information is directly measured power consumption. The suggestion is that developers can try different algorithms to see which one uses least power.

Elsewhere, there's a new Android SDK Upgrade Assistant that is designed to help you update apps to Android 14. The assistant provides a step by step wizard to help developers through targetSdkVersion upgrades. The Studio team says they've also added additional relevance filters so that unnecessary steps are removed, and that in some cases, the upgrade assistant will pinpoint exactly where in code the changes need to be made.

Another change means you can now mirror your physical Android device in the Running Devices window in Android Studio, and this can be used to execute common actions such as starting and interacting with apps, rotating the screen, folding and unfolding the phone, and changing the volume directly from within Android Studio.

Android Studio Hedgehog is available now.

More Information

Android Studio Website

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