Posted by Neville Sicard-Gregory – Senior Product Supervisor, Android Studio
Searching 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 soundness, 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 massive characteristic work on the Android Emulator for six months and began an initiative known as Venture Quartz. This initiative was made up of a number of workstreams geared toward lowering crashes, rushing up startup time, closing out bugs, and organising higher methods to detect and forestall points sooner or later.
Improved stability and reliability
A key aim of Venture Quartz aimed to scale back Emulator crashes, which may frustrate and block builders, reducing 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 moderen model of Qt, the cross-platform framework for constructing the graphical consumer 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 assessments to the present pytests take a look at suite.
Because of this, we’ve got 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).
Now we have additionally enhanced our opt-in telemetry and logging to higher perceive and establish the basis causes of crashes, and added extra testing to our pre-launch launch course of to enhance our capability 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 assessments on macOS, Microsoft Home windows, and Linux. Now, greater than 1,100 end-to-end assessments are ran in postsubmit, up from 500 assessments prior to now implementation, on all supported working system platforms . These assessments cowl numerous situations, together with (amongst different options) totally different Android Emulator snapshot configurations, various graphics card issues , 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 atmosphere for builders. Because of this, Android app builders can precisely assess their app’s conduct in a wider vary of situations.
Lowered open points and bugs
It was additionally essential 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 instances you run into in manufacturing. Throughout Venture Quartz, we lowered our open points by 43.5% from 4,605 to 2,605. 17% of those had been actively mounted throughout Quartz and the remaining had 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 isn’t the top. We are going to proceed to construct on the standard enhancements from Venture 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 improvement wants. Sharing your metrics and crashdumps is essential in serving to us perceive what particularly causes your crashes so we are able to prioritize fixes.
You’ll be able to opt-in by going to Settings, then Look and Habits, then System Settings, then Knowledge Sharing, and choosing 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 at all times, your suggestions is essential to us – test identified points, report bugs, recommend enhancements, and be a part of our vibrant group on LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, or X. Collectively, we are able to create unbelievable Android experiences for customers worldwide!