What’s New in Android Studio 4.0 features?

Google launched its all new Android Studio 4.0 on May 28, 2020. It was something fresh and new in the midst of ongoing pandemic Covid 19. With every new version, Google brings on new updates and it becomes easier for developers to overcome the bugs and work at a faster and smoother rate. Every developer should know the powers of the Android Studio 4.0 version. In this article, we are about to unleash Android studio 4.0 new features and its benefits. What’s New in Android Studio 4.0 features? How has it saved hundreds of hours for a developer and how it has made their life easier? You will get all your answers here. 

Android Studio 4.0 new features

According to the Android Studio release notes, there are various features that Google has introduced in Android Studio 4.0. These new features are really helpful for the developers. We also checked them out, and here are some of those useful features that we wanted to bring in the limelight. 

Live Layout Inspector 

With this new feature in Android Studio 4.0, you can easily debug an application’s UI. It provides you with easy access to the data that is kept updated with the running application. You can easily get an insight about how resources are being set. Go to the Tool windows and select the Layout Inspector option. This isn’t over yet, as you can even get access to some amazing additional features, if you are installing your application to a device that runs on either API 29 level or even higher than that.  

Layout Validation 

It is possible to produce layouts in several devices and set up configuration simultaneously at the same time in a hassle-free way. Layout Multi-preview or Layout Validation are great visualization tools. Till now, switching between various screen sizes & resolutions in preview mode was a challenging affair during layout creation.

Now, things have become much simpler as you just require to select the pixel devices & then you can simply check/preview the alterations in the integrated development environment. Using this tool,possible issues can be identified in the UI. To access this tool, click on the Layout Validation tab in the top right corner of the IDE window.

Motion Editor 

It has now become handy for the developers to create, preview and edit their animations, without even developing the whole application. It can be done with the new feature of Android Studio 4.0. Motion Editor produces XML and also upgrades the visual design editor. It is a part of constraint layout, with which you can now easily manage motion and widget animations in various mobile applications. 

Build Analyzer 

Developing an application used to take its own time with multiple jobs. But, with this new tool, you can easily moderate your productivity and time by identifying misconfigured and outdated jobs. This tool points out your plugins and jobs and hence, suggests ways to decrease multiple regressions. Now you can easily track down the exact segment of the build system taking more time. 

3D Graph View 

It was very hard for the developers to figure out minor glitches in UI while developing any application. But, now with this really cool feature, 3D Graph View of Android Studio Version 4.0, developers can inspect the elements and can easily find out the glitches. 

Java 8 Language Library Desugaring For All APIs

Deploying Java 8 features is not an easy task during Android app development. You might stumble on some code that utilizes Steam or wish for a lambda function implementation or there might be a Java 8 API that is not practical to work with.

Thanks to the Android Gradle plugin, compilation of some Java 8 features with the older APIs have become easy. With Android Studio 4.0, you can use the desugaring engine to lend support to the Java languages.

Fragment Wizards

There are brand new fragment templates & wizards available in the navigation editor. These help developers in quickly navigating fragment wizard content to create slideshows utilizing the ViewPager. This tool helps in setting up the slide animation & improves the app’s appearance & quality.

In easy words, Fragment can be defined as a class in Android that enables the integration of a User Interface, to make it adaptable to various device screen orientations. It blends several types of segments into a single-screen component.

Kotlin Android Live Templates

Kotlin DSLscript files receive in-built support from Android Studio 4.0. There is a complete suite of instantaneous fixes, that the project structure dialogue supports. In addition to that, there are Android-specific live templates for Kotlin code.

For the entire list of the available live templates, simply navigate to Editor> Live templates from the settings/preferences dialogue.

CPU Profiler UI Upgrades

CPU Profilers can be counted as one of the best new features introduced in Android Studio 4.0. The CPU profiler has been designed to provide you with data linked to trace recording & the thread activity of your application.

The recordings from the CPU can be easily set aside from the central profiler timeline. They can be managed in separate groups for easier analysis. One can easily drag-and-drop or move the groups up & down or the individual items inside a group for extra customization.

Smart Editor for R8 Rules 

R8 was introduced to improve the noticeable build performance. Earlier the editor in Android Studio lacked a smart support system for providing auto-suggestions. But now this problem has been resolved with the introduction of Smart Editor for writing R8 rules. This editor has some cool features like syntax highlighter, error checker, etc. It also provides full symbol completion for all fields, classes and methods.  

Conclusion

Above we have mentioned some of the features that we really found cool. Other such amazing features of 4.0 version are: CPU Profiler UI Upgrades, Kotlin Android Live Templates, Java 8 Language Library Desugaring, Build Features, Fragment Wizards, Feature on Feature Dependencies, etc. These features improve the performance of Android Applications. They are really helping android application developers to code efficiently and quickly. The competition is rising, and with the rising competition, every smart and professional Android Application Development Company has shifted to the latest version of Android Studio. The launch of Android Studio version 4.0 has changed things and has also increased productivity. 

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