Android Studio 4.0 motion editor build analyzer Java 8 API

Android Studio 4.0 layout inspector

Android Studio 4.0 promises to make Android developers more productive.

Google released the stable version of Android Studio 4.0, its latest integrated development environment (EDI or IDE - Integrated Development Environment) for creating Android apps on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS.

The three main additions to Android Studio 4.0 are a motion editor to speed up the creation of complex animations, a build parser that helps understand the cause of build problems, and application protocol interfaces (Apis) in Java 8 language.

Google released Android Studio 4.0 just before the first beta version of Android 11, which was delayed from a month to June 3 due to the complications created by the global Coronavirus pandemic.

Google is organizing a virtual presentation of the beta version of Android 11 to explain some of the updates to Android Studio, Jetpack Compose and Google Play that it should have presented at the Google I/O developers conference, cancelled this year.

Understanding library dependencies

In addition to these new features, Android Studio 4.0 includes a new CPU Profiler user interface to allow developers to more easily analyze thread activity, as well as an improved Layout Inspector that provides live data from an application’s user interface to debug what is displayed on the device.

The motion editor interfaces with the Motionlayout library and supports the manual creation of XML resource files for the construction of animations. It also supports start and end states, key images, transitions and timelines.

Another improvement is the Layout
Validation feature, which allows you to simultaneously compare a user interface over multiple screen dimensions, making it easier to test an application for multiple devices, screen sizes and resolutions.

The Build Analyzer helps identify issues such as plugins that can impact build times. The tool window organizes the problems in a list on the left panel with details for each problem explained in the right panel.

Another improvement is the Layout
Validation feature

Google has also implemented tools to help developers identify library dependencies in an application. Developers who create an application with the Android Gradle 4.0.0 plugin have a view of the metadata dependencies, which describe the library dependencies that are compiled into an application.

When downloading an application, the Play Console inspects metadata to provide alerts about known issues with Sdks and application dependencies. In some cases, it also provides feedback to resolve problems.

And there is now an R8 editor for developers who create rule files for R8, Google’s tool to help reduce the size of an application. Android Studio now allows you to highlight the syntax, complete the code and check for errors.