Posted by Neville Sicard-Gregory – Senior Product Supervisor, Android Studio
On the lookout for a extra secure, dependable, and performant Emulator? Obtain the most recent model of Android Studio or guarantee your Emulator is updated within the SDK Supervisor.
We all know how vital the steadiness, reliability, and efficiency of the Android Emulator is to your on a regular basis work as an Android developer. After listening to worthwhile suggestions about stability, reliability, and efficiency, the Android Studio workforce took a step again from giant characteristic work on the Android Emulator for six months and began an initiative referred to as Undertaking Quartz. This initiative was made up of a number of workstreams geared toward lowering crashes, rushing up startup time, closing out bugs, and establishing higher methods to detect and stop points sooner or later.
Improved stability and reliability
A key purpose of Undertaking Quartz aimed to scale back Emulator crashes, which might frustrate and block builders, reducing their productiveness. We centered on fixing points inflicting backend and UI crashes and freezes, up to date the UI framework, up to date our hypervisor framework, and our graphics libraries, and eradicated tech debt. This included:
- Transferring to a more moderen model of Qt, the cross-platform framework for constructing the graphical person interfaces of the Android Emulator, and making it secure on all platforms (as of model 34.2.13/ This was additionally a required change to make sure issues like Google Maps and the situation settings UI continued to work within the Android Emulator.
- Updating gfxstream, the graphics rendering system used within the Android Emulator, to enhance our graphics layer.
- Including greater than 600 end-to-end checks to the present pytests check suite.
Consequently, we now have seen 30% fewer crashes within the newest secure model of Android Studio, as reported by builders who’ve opted-in to sharing crash particulars with us. Together with extra end-to-end testing, this implies a extra secure, dependable, and better high quality expertise with fewer interruptions whereas utilizing the Android Emulator to check your apps.
This chart illustrates the discount in reported crashes by secure variations of the Android Emulator (newer variations are on the high and shorter is best).
We now have additionally enhanced our opt-in telemetry and logging to higher perceive and determine the basis causes of crashes, and added extra testing to our pre-launch launch course of to enhance our skill to detect potential points previous to launch.
Improved launch high quality
We additionally carried out a number of measures to enhance launch high quality, together with rising the quantity and frequency of end-to-end, automated, and integration checks on macOS, Microsoft Home windows, and Linux. Now, greater than 1,100 end-to-end checks are ran in postsubmit, up from 500 checks prior to now implementation, on all supported working system platforms . These checks cowl numerous eventualities, together with (amongst different options) completely different Android Emulator snapshot configurations, numerous graphics card concerns , networking and Bluetooth performance, and efficiency benchmarks between Android Emulator system picture variations.
This complete testing ensures these vital parts operate accurately and interprets to a extra dependable testing setting for builders. Consequently, Android app builders can precisely assess their app’s habits in a wider vary of eventualities.
Decreased open points and bugs
It was additionally vital for us to scale back the variety of open points and bugs logged for the Android Emulator by addressing their root trigger and guaranteeing we cowl extra of the use circumstances you run into in manufacturing. Throughout Undertaking Quartz, we diminished our open points by 43.5% from 4,605 to 2,605. 17% of those have been actively mounted throughout Quartz and the remaining have been closed as both obsoleted or beforehand mounted (e.g. in an earlier model of the Android Emulator) or duplicates of different points.
Subsequent Steps
Whereas these enhancements are thrilling, it is not the tip. We are going to proceed to construct on the standard enhancements from Undertaking Quartz to additional improve the Android Emulator expertise for Android app builders.
As at all times, your suggestions has and continues to be invaluable in serving to us make the Android Emulator and Android Studio extra strong and efficient in your growth wants. Sharing your metrics and crashdumps is essential in serving to us perceive what particularly causes your crashes so we will prioritize fixes.
You’ll be able to opt-in by going to Settings, then Look and Habits, then System Settings, then Information Sharing, and choosing the checkbox marked ‘Ship utilization statistics to Google.’
Be sure you obtain the most recent model of the Android Emulator alongside Android Studio to expertise these enhancements.
As at all times, your suggestions is vital to us – test identified points, report bugs, counsel enhancements, and be a part of our vibrant neighborhood on LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, or X. Collectively, we will create unimaginable Android experiences for customers worldwide!