Posted by Neville Sicard-Gregory – Senior Product Supervisor, Android Studio
Searching for a extra secure, dependable, and performant Emulator? Obtain the newest model of Android Studio or guarantee your Emulator is updated within the SDK Supervisor.
We all know how important 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 crew took a step again from massive characteristic work on the Android Emulator for six months and began an initiative referred to as Mission Quartz. This initiative was made up of a number of workstreams aimed toward decreasing crashes, dashing up startup time, closing out bugs, and organising higher methods to detect and forestall points sooner or later.
Improved stability and reliability
A key objective of Mission Quartz aimed to cut back Emulator crashes, which may 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 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 got 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 capacity 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 growing 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 up 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, various graphics card issues , networking and Bluetooth performance, and efficiency benchmarks between Android Emulator system picture variations.
This complete testing ensures these important parts operate appropriately and interprets to a extra dependable testing atmosphere for builders. In consequence, Android app builders can precisely assess their app’s conduct in a wider vary of eventualities.
Diminished 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 making certain we cowl extra of the use instances you run into in manufacturing. Throughout Mission Quartz, we diminished our open points by 43.5% from 4,605 to 2,605. 17% of those have been actively fastened throughout Quartz and the remaining have 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 isn’t the top. We’ll proceed to construct on the standard enhancements from Mission 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 sturdy and efficient to 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’ll be able to opt-in by going to Settings, then Look and Conduct, then System Settings, then Information Sharing, and deciding on the checkbox marked ‘Ship utilization statistics to Google.’
Make sure you obtain the newest model of the Android Emulator alongside Android Studio to expertise these enhancements.
As at all times, your suggestions is essential to us – test recognized 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!
