Google has released a new update to Android Studio, giving developers more features and enhancements to improve their apps. Android 2.3 features quality improvements as well as new features for each phase of the development workflow.
The company has made significant changes to Instant Run and the UI in the IDE. The Run action will now ensure an application restarts to reflect any code changes and attempt to swap code if the code continues to run with the Apply Changes feature.
In addition, Android Studio 2.3 eliminates the startup lag for Instant Run, and it features Build Cache, which was previously disabled by default in version 2.2.
The design phase features chains and ratios support in Constraint Layout to allow users to chain two or more Android views and maintain aspect ratio. Other features include an update to the Layout Editor palette, the added ability to save favorite attributes per widget, WebP support, and an updated vector asset wizard to support search and filtering.
The development phase allows developers to set unresolved lint warnings, reports only new issues, supports Android app links with the new App Links Assistant, updates templates, and improves the IntelliJ platform.
For the test phase, developers can now take advantage of the Android emulator copy-and-paste feature, and Android emulator command-line tools.
“The focus for this release is quality improvements across the IDE,” wrote Jamal Eason, product manager for Android, in a blog post.
“We are grateful for all your feedback so far. We are committed to continuing to invest in making Android Studio fast and seamless for the millions of Android app developers across the world.”
If you are using a previous version of Android Studio, you can check for updates on the Stable channel from the navigation menu (Help → Check for Update , Android Studio → Check for Updates ). You can also download Android Studio 2.3 from the official download page.
To take advantage of all the new features and improvements in Android Studio, you should also update to the Android Gradle plugin version to 2.3.0 in your current app project.
