Android Studio 3.3 Focuses on Quality

Google announced the release of Android Studio 3.3 today. But there are no major new features: Instead, this release focuses on “quality fundamentals.”

“We are excited to kick off the new year with a stable release of Android Studio 3.3 focused on refinement and quality,” Google’s Jamal Eason writes. “Based on the feedback from many of you, we have taken a step back from large features to focus on our quality fundamentals. The goal is to ensure Android Studio continues to help you stay productive in making great apps for Android.”

Android Studio is Google’s interactive development environment (IDE) for developers creating Android apps. This latest release addresses over 200 user-reported bugs since the last stable release and adds official support for Navigation Editor, improved incremental Java compilation when using annotation processors, C++ code lint inspections, an updated new project wizard, and usability fixes for each of the performance profilers, Google says. Performance is up as well; for example, saving snapshots on exit for the Android emulator is 8x faster than before.

The new quality focus for Google’s developer tools is codenamed Project Marble, and it was announced at the Android Developer Summit in November.

“Project Marble is the Android Studio team’s focus on making the fundamental features and flows of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rock-solid, along with refining and polishing the user-facing features that matter to you in your day-to-day app development workflows,” Eason explains. “In Project Marble, we are specifically looking at reducing the number of crashes, hangs, memory leaks, and user-impacting bugs. We are also investing in our measurement infrastructure to prevent these issues from occurring.”

What Google should be focusing on in equal measure is performance: Android Studio is feature-rich, but it’s dog on both Windows and Mac. I assume there will be work in this area throughout 2019 as well.

You can download Android Studio from the Android Developer website.