THE ANDROID DEVELOPER TOOLS NOW UPDATED BY GOOGLE
The Android giant Google just updated its Android developer tools and was actually made public by the company the same day it launched the first beta of Android 11 exclusively supported by Pixel phones for now. However, the company took a different dimension in notifying the public of this update due to concerns over the coronavirus coupled with the current racial protests. Instead, Google posted a couple of videos, a blog post, and equally went ahead to update sites for some of these features aimed to make things easier for Android developers.
More importantly, is it’s Android Studio which is vital for these updates, Google’s IDE for Android development, in the process saw the company released both the beta of Android Studio 4.1 and Android 4.2 respectively. Responding to the event cancellation, the company stated:
“We have canceled the virtual launch event to allow people to focus on important discussions around racial justice in the United States, adding that, “instead, we are releasing the Android 11 Beta today in a much different form, via short-form videos and web pages that you can consume at your own pace when the time is right for you”.
Meanwhile, an answer to something developers have asked for a very long time – wireless debugging over ADB with Android 11 in Android Studio that is actually a major time saver for developers did Google’s Android director ‘Stephanie’ clarified. In the same vein, is the Android Emulator which has witnessed some performance enhancements in some iterations are now hosted directly inside the IDE, with that, developers can now run a side-by-side on-device test to hasten workflow.
It’s understood, Android developer tools announcement wouldn’t be complete without noting some machine learning part, based on this, the Android giant also made it clear while announcing the latest update that the developer’s ML Kit and TensorFlow Lite models are readily available to be imported directly in the IDE.
Currently, the overall build and development processes have been made pretty fast with the aid of caching in Gradle and the native Kotlin annotation processing, even as Google continues to support Java, the Android giant is also understood to be putting a lot of resources to its preferred language for Android development – Kotlin. While the company is also introducing a new user interface for its performance profilers with regards to game developers.
Based on this development, Google has moved to support Kotlin coroutines, with coroutine positioned as an official recommendation, and this is also based on the fact that a good number of top apps in the Google Play Store use the Kotlin language. Also in addition to its launch is Jetpack Compose in its new UI toolkit for Android, though not yet set for product deployment, however, its latest update saw the introduction of Jetpack Compose Developer Preview 2, which includes features such as constraint layout, animations, and more.
Lastly to note, is the launching of a redesigned Google Play Console, with a promising design that will make the console “clearer and easier to use”.
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