Google Releases Android Studio Electric Eel

Google today announced the release of Android Studio Electric Eel, the next major version of its integrated development environment.

Today, we are electrified to announce the latest stable release of the official IDE for building Android applications: Android Studio Electric Eel (2022.1.1),” Google’s Paris Hsu, writes. “This release includes updates and new features that cover across design, build and dependencies, emulators and devices, and IntelliJ.”

Some of the key new features and updates include:

Compose Preview improvements. Previously, you had to manually refresh Compose Previews after making changes. In Electric Eel, Previews update automatically after you make compatible code changes in the same file.

Visual Linting for Views. Visual linting now runs in the background for XML layouts to check for issues across different form factors, detecting problems like overlapping or non-visible elements.

New Logcat. Logcat has been completely rewritten from the ground up to make it easier to parse, query, and track logs.

App quality insights. The new App Quality Insights tools let you browse and investigate crash data from Firebase Crashlytics directly in Android Studio without having to jump back and forth between the IDE and a browser.

New emulator and device options. Electric Eel is the first Android Studio version to support Desktop emulators so you can test how apps behave on Chromebooks, where apps can be freeform resized or minimized. There’s also an experimental feature that lets you resize the emulator so you can test on different screen sizes using the same emulator.

There is a lot more. Check out the original post for the details. You can download Android Studio Electric Eel from the Android Developer website.