Google Releases Android Studio 4.2

Google today announced the release of Android Studio 4.2, a minor update to its flagship developer environment that adds a handful of new features.

“We are excited to announce that Android Studio 4.2 is now available to download in the stable release channel,” Google’s Jamal Eason writes. “The focus areas for this release [are] an upgraded IntelliJ platform and a handful of new features centered around improving your productivity as an Android app developer.”

Key new features include:

IntelliJ platform update. Android Studio 4.2 includes all the major features and updates found in IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition 2020.2, which includes an updated GitHub UI for pull requests, and new centralized problems window, and more. You can learn more here.

New Project Wizard and Module Wizard Updates. This release brings a visual refresh to the New Project and Module wizards, and each new project template gets a ViewBinding now too.

Improvements to Apply Changes. The Apply Changes feature lets developers push code and resource updates to a running app without having to restart it first. In Android Studio 4.2, this feature supports more compatible changes when running the app on an Android 11+ device or emulator.

Multiple Device Deployment. Now, you can deploy to multiple devices at the same time while developing an app. (This feature was apparently available in early Android Studio versions and has been brought back.)

There’s more, but you can learn about the other new features in the original post. You can also download Android Studio 4.2 from the Android Developer website.