Android Studio 4.0 was released to the stable channel yesterday, which means that everyone — not just developers on the bleeding edge — can get their hands on it! You can download it here.
Want a video overview of what’s new? Here you go:
Among the goodies in this new version of the IDE are:
- Motion editor: Lets you define your animations between MotionLayout states in a more Flash-like way, instead of having to spec them in XML, which is rather clunky.
- New layout inspector: A much better way to see how the UI is laid out on your app’s screens.
- Layout validation: You can now more easily see how your app will look on different screen sizes at different resolutions:
- “Desugaring” extended to Java language APIs: Just as Android Gradle supported Java 8 language features for all API levels so that you can use lambdas and other modern Java goodies on Android projects that target old SDKs, it now supports Java language APIs. Until now, only the more recent SDKs supported APIs like
java.util.stream,java.util.functionandjava.time.