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 crucial 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 staff took a step again from giant function work on the Android Emulator for six months and began an initiative known as Undertaking Quartz. This initiative was made up of a number of workstreams geared toward decreasing crashes, dashing up startup time, closing out bugs, and establishing higher methods to detect and forestall points sooner or later.
Improved stability and reliability
A key objective of Undertaking Quartz aimed to cut back Emulator crashes, which might frustrate and block builders, lowering their productiveness. We targeted 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:
- Shifting to a more recent 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 placement 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 exams to the prevailing pytests check suite.
In consequence, 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 further 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’ve additionally enhanced our opt-in telemetry and logging to raised perceive and determine the basis causes of crashes, and added extra testing to our pre-launch launch course of to enhance our means to detect potential points previous to launch.
Improved launch high quality
We additionally applied a number of measures to enhance launch high quality, together with rising the quantity and frequency of end-to-end, automated, and integration exams on macOS, Microsoft Home windows, and Linux. Now, greater than 1,100 end-to-end exams are ran in postsubmit, up from 500 exams previously implementation, on all supported working system platforms . These exams cowl varied eventualities, together with (amongst different options) totally 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 crucial elements operate accurately and interprets to a extra dependable testing atmosphere for builders. In consequence, Android app builders can precisely assess their app’s habits in a wider vary of eventualities.
Decreased open points and bugs
It was additionally essential for us to cut 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 lowered our open points by 43.5% from 4,605 to 2,605. 17% of those had been actively fastened throughout Quartz and the remaining had been closed as both obsoleted or beforehand fastened (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 top. 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 all the time, your suggestions has and continues to be invaluable in serving to us make the Android Emulator and Android Studio extra sturdy and efficient on your improvement wants. Sharing your metrics and crashdumps is essential in serving to us perceive what particularly causes your crashes so we will prioritize fixes.
You possibly can opt-in by going to Settings, then Look and Habits, then System Settings, then Knowledge Sharing, and deciding on the checkbox marked ‘Ship utilization statistics to Google.’
Make sure you obtain the most recent model of the Android Emulator alongside Android Studio to expertise these enhancements.
As all the time, your suggestions is essential to us – verify recognized points, report bugs, counsel enhancements, and be a part of our vibrant group on LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, or X. Collectively, we will create unbelievable Android experiences for customers worldwide!
