New releases of Android, like the upcoming Android 14, are probably what most of us are looking forward to, but app developers have one more piece of software they want to see updated: the official study of the Android development environment. Since 2021, Google has started releasing new versions with funny animal kingdom names, which is why this week's new version is called Electric Eel (or 2022.1.1). While its Dolphin predecessor was mostly about fixing bugs, Electric Eel is a bigger update.
Emulator updates and new version of IntelliJ
First, Electric Eel has some big improvements for emulators and connected device testing. Emulators has a new desktop category for testing app behavior on Chromebooks and similar form factors. It allows developers to test their applications in windowed environments with full scaling support. In the same vein, Google has introduced an experimental scale emulator that allows you to test applications in different forms without using multiple emulators.
What might be even more important than emulator testing for developers is testing on real hardware, and Google makes that easy too. Like the third-party ADB tool scrcpy, Android Studio now offers experimental support for device mirroring. It allows developers to view and interact with the screen of a connected device directly from their computer and test applications without switching from computer to phone.
You may be wondering why this update is called 2022.1.1 and not something like 2023, and the reason is that the version number does not correspond to the current year, but to the current version of the IntelliJ platform. Therefore, Android Studio Electric Eel is the first version of the IDE that supports IntelliJ 2022.1. Google says they offer "many new features, such as a dependency analyzer for easier dependency management and conflict resolution, and a notification tool window that provides a new and simplified way to receive notifications from the IDE."
Layout and improvements to Logcat
When you use Compose Previews, you can get used to manually updating to see the changes you've made to the code. Electric Eel now includes these changes, helping you see what you're doing right in your code. For incompatible code changes, the new "Rebuild Required" status will mean manually restarting the process.
Preview Preview now also allows you to specify your preferred specifications for custom reference tools. You can still choose right out of the box, but now you have more freedom to test your app in different environments. When your app shows multiple iterations, the new layout inspector will now show you which parts of the UI were most recently modified with an overlay. This should help you track down any problems.
There's also a new "Generic Issues" panel that will show you any issues reported by various tools in Android Studio.
Logcat has been completely redesigned and rewritten to make it easier to use. This was already available as part of a previous version of Dolphin, but now becomes the default view going forward. Improvements include improved formatting, search improvements, and autocomplete support for filters.
Android Studio Electric Eel is now available
There's a lot more to this build, and you can read all about it on the Android Developer Blog, which has more substantial details. If you want to jump right into the new version of Android Studio, you can download it from the Android developer site.
