In Android, Google bets on desserts, but in Android Studio what they take are animals. From the squirrel of Android Studio Chipmunk we move on to the dolphin of Android Studio Dolphin 2021.3.1which can now be downloaded.
Android Studio Dolphin 2021.3.1 is a lighter update than previous ones, with news focusing on Jetpack Compose and the Wear OS emulator. Of course, we also have other improvements and fixes under the hood and a new version of IntelliJ.
Jetpack composition improvements
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Animation Inspector. It is now possible to view all supported animations at once and coordinate them with the new Animation Preview Inspector. You can view frame-by-frame animation there.
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Annotation preview. Instead of copying and pasting the same @Preview code over and over into your application, you can now define an annotation class that includes preview definitions.
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Number of Compose recompositions in Layout Inspector. To help you debug your interface in Jetpack Compose, you can now track recompositions in the Layout Inspector.
Best Wear OS Emulator
- Wear OS Pairing Wizard. New wizard to pair a Wear OS smartwatch with the Android Studio device manager, without having to use ADB commands. Also, there is no need to repeat the process the next time you open Android Studio.
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Toolbar in emulator. The Wear OS emulator now includes new buttons for interacting with the virtual device: simulating a palm gesture, simulating button rotation, and pressing physical buttons.
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Launch Settings. It is now possible to create run or debug configurations to run Wear OS tiles, skins and complications.
development tools
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Based on IntelliJ 2021.3. Included are IntelliJ 2021.3 enhancements such as improved usage search, Kotlin debugger, Kotlin constant condition inspection.
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Virtual appliances managed by Gradle. Gradle will take care of automating your tests by downloading the SDK, configuring the devices, and running the tests and other related enhancements.
If you have already installed a previous version, you can update from the menu Help > Check for updates. If not – or if the update is giving you problems – you can Download Android Studio Dolphin from scratch from your website.
More information | Android Developers