Google today announced the release of Android Studio Hedgehog, the next major version of its IDE (integrated development environment) for Android developers.
“Today, we are thrilled to announce the stable release of Android Studio Hedgehog, the official IDE for building Android apps,” Google product manager Sandhya Mohan writes in the announcement post. “In this Android Studio release, we have upgraded the IntelliJ platform 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.”
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Key improvements in Android Studio Hedgehog include:
App performance insights. The App Quality Insights tool in Android Studio now includes Android vitals data from the Google Play Console including crash reports.
Power Profiler. This new tool visualizes how much power your apps are really using on devices, a big improvement over the Energy Profiler, which only estimates power usage.
SDK Upgrade Assistant improvements. The SDK Upgrade Assistant now provides a wizard for helping developers step through the process of upgrading to new OS versions, and it now supports Android 14 (API Level 34). In some cases, it can help pinpoint exactly where code changes need to be made.
UI improvements. Android Studio Hedgehog now supports a compact mode, vertical and horizontal window splitting, and project tabs on macOS.
Device mirroring. A new Running Devices window lets you mirror a physical Android device in the IDE over USB or Wi-Fi so you can interact with the device without leaving Android Studio.
Layout Inspector improvements. You can now embed the Layout Inspector in the Running Devices window while running an app on virtual hardware or a mirrored device, dramatically improving its performance and saving a lot of onscreen real estate. This is an opt-in feature that needs to be enabled first.
Compose Preview improvements. Compose Preview now supports a new Gallery Mode that lets you focus on a single preview at a time so you can iterate the UI and conserve rendering resources.
You can download Android Studio Hedgehog from the Android Developer website.