What’s new in Android Studio 3.6

The latest version of Android Studio

Google has published the most recent release of its integrated development environment. As per the corporate, the release of Studio 3.6 aims to handle quality specifically in code writing and debugging use cases.

The company published a brand-new packaging tool that aims to boost build performance and alter the default packaging tool to zip flinger for correct builds. In addition, developers will import externally-built APKs to correct and profile them, in keeping with Scott Swarthout, product manager for Android.

Let’s talk about new features of Android Studio 3.6

Design

1. Split view in design editors

Design editors, like the Layout Editor and Navigation Editor, currently offer a Split read that permits us to envision each the look and Code views of our UI at the same time. Split view replaces and improves upon the sooner Preview window, and might be organized on a file-by-file basis to preserve context info like zoom issue and style read choices, therefore we will be able to opt for the reader that works best for every use case.

2. Color picker tab

In this unharness we tend to wished to create it easier to use colors we have got outlined as color resources. In Android Studio 3.6, the color picker populates the color assets in our app for us to quickly select and replace color assets values. The color picker is accessible within the style tools furthermore as within the XML editor.

Develop

1. View binding

View binding may be a feature that permits us to a lot of simply write code that interacts with views by providing compile-time safety once referencing views in our code. Once enabled, view binding generates a binding category for every XML layout file available there in a module. In most cases, read binding replaces findViewById. We will reference all views that have an ID with no risk of a null pointer or class cast exceptions. These variations mean that incompatibilities between our layout and our code will result in our build failing at compile time instead of at runtime. To modify view binding in our project, embrace the subsequent in every module’s build.gradle file:

android {
    viewBinding.enabled = true
}

2. Android NDK updates

The following Android NDK options in Android Studio, antecedently supported in Java, now it currently supported in Kotlin also:

• Navigate from JNI expressions to the undifferentiated implementation function in C/C++. View this mapping by hovering over the C or C++ item marker close to the line number within the managed source code file.
  
• Automatically produce a stub implementation function for a JNI declaration. Define the JNI declaration 1st then type “JNI” or the tactic name within the C/C++ file to activate.

3. Add classes with Apply Changes

We can currently add a class and so deploy that code change to our running app by clicking either Apply Code Changes or Apply Changes and Restart Activity.

Build

1. Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) updates

Android Gradle plugin 3.6 and higher include support for the Maven Publish Gradle plugin, that permits you to publish build artifacts to an Apache Maven repository. The Android Gradle plugin creates a part for every build variant unit in your app or library module that you simply will use to customize a publication to an adept repository. This modification can create it easier to manage the discharge lifecycle for your varied targets.

Additionally, the Android Gradle plugin has created vital performance improvement for annotation processing/KAPT for big projects. this can be caused by AGP currently generating R class bytecode directly, instead of .java files.

2. New packaging tool

The Android build team is unendingly engaged in changes to boost build performance, and during this release, we tend to modify the default packaging tool to zipflinger for debug builds. Users should see an improvement in build speed, however, you’ll additionally revert to the exploitation of the recent packaging tool by setting in the project’s gradle.properties file.