Android Studio 2.0 Beta brings Instant Run, New Emulator and more

Rapid John·
GoogleAndroidDevelopers
···1 min read
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Android Studio 2.0 Beta is now available in the Beta release channel for developers, bringing Instant Run, a new Android emulator along with a host of improvements that should speed up app development time.

Instant Run

First previewed in November; this latest beta release introduces a new capability called Cold Swap

Instant Run in Android Studio 2.0 allows you to quickly make changes to your app code while your app is running on an Android device or Android Emulator. Instead of waiting for your entire app to rebuild and redeploy after each code change, Android Studio 2.0 will try to incrementally build and push only the incremental code or resource change.

Depending on the code changes you make, you can see the results of your change in under a second. By simply updating your app to use the latest Gradle plugin ( ‘com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.0.0-beta2’ ), you can take advantage of this time saving features with no other modifications to your code.

App Indexing

Supporting app indexing is now even easier with Android Studio 2.0. App Indexing puts your app in front of users who use Google Search. It works by indexing the URL patterns you provide in your app manifest and using API calls from your app to make content within your app available to both existing and new users.

Specifically, when you support URLs for your app content, your users can go directly to those links from Google Search results on their device.

Overall, Android Studio 2.0 release has a host of new features which include:

  • Instant Run – Enables a faster code edit & app deployment cycle.
  • Android Emulator – Brand new emulator that is faster than most real devices, and includes a brand new user interface.
  • Google App Indexing Integration & Testing – Adding App Indexing into your app helps you re-engage your users. In the first preview of Android Studio 2.0 you could add indexing code stubs into your code. With the beta release you can now test and validate your URL links in your app all within the IDE.
  • Fast ADB – Installing and pushing files is now up to 5x faster using Android Studio 2.0 with an updated Android Debug Bridge (ADB) offered in platform-tools 23.1.0.
  • GPU Profiler Preview – For graphics intensive applications, you can now visually step through your OpenGL ES code to optimize your app or game
  • Integration of IntelliJ 15 – Android Studio is based on the efficient coding platform of Intellij. Check out the new features from IntelliJ here.

You can check out in more detail what’s new in the Android Studio 2.0 beta here.