After months of testing on the Canary channel, Google finally graduated Android Studio Dolphin to the beta channel at its I/O Developer Conference today. The beta release packs various Jetpack Compose features and improvements, new features for the Wear OS emulator, and a couple of additional developer tools. Along with the Dolphin beta release, Google has rolled out the first Android Studio Electric Eel Canary release. It too brings a host of new features and improvements. In this post, we'll take a look at all the new features in the latest Canary release.
What's new in Android Studio Electric Eel Canary?
The Android Studio Electric Eel Canary release brings along a few additional features and improvements. Here's an overview of what's new:
Jetpack Compose
As with the Android Studio Dolphin Beta, the Electric Eel Canary release brings a new Jetpack Compose feature. In this release, developers will find a new Live Edit feature that will let them view code changes in real-time in the Compose Preview and the emulator or physical device.
Live Edit is an opt-in feature that developers will have to enable in the Android Studio setting.
Google Play and Firebase
Android Studio Electric Eel Canary also brings a couple of new Google Play and Firebase improvements. For instance, the build will let developers get Lint warnings for SDKs and Libraries that have been marked as outdated by their authors in the Google Play SDK Index. This will let them easily update outdated dependency versions during development to avoid issues when the app is submitted to the Play Console.
The Electric Eel Canary release also brings Firebase Crashlytics integration, which will let developers discover, investigate, and resolve issues reported by Crashlytics in Android Studio and within the context of the local source code.
Google claims that this integration will help "reduce friction between navigating from crashes to code (and from code to crash)" and surface important contextual data about each crash to help developers reproduce issues locally.
Large Screens
To aid developers in building better apps for large-screen Android devices, Google has also included a resizable emulator in the Electric Eel Canary release. The emulator will let developers rapidly toggle between representative reference devices to test various app layout states within a single emulator instance. This feature was actually introduced in Android Studio Chipmunk, but Google is highlighting it again this time around.
Furthermore, the Layout Validation panel will help developers discover and fix layout issues across different devices.
The emulator will automatically run the layout to check for Visual Lint issues across different screen sizes to avoid issues, like buttons hidden out of bounds on a large-screen device.
Development Tools
The Canary build also gets Emulated Bluetooth support, which will allow developers to discover and connect two phone emulators using virtual Bluetooth. This feature is available in Android Emulator v31.3.8 and higher with system image T (API 33). Google plans to add more support in sample virtual peripherals such as beacons and heart rate monitors in future releases.
Google has also added Device Mirroring support to minimize the number of interruptions during app development. This feature lets developers stream their device display directly to Android Studio, giving them the ability to interact with a physical device using the Running Devices window.
Download Android Studio Electric Eel Canary
Android Studio Electric Eel Canary is now available for download. You can get it by clicking on the following link and installing it side-by-side with the stable version using the instructions provided here.