
Android Studio 3.2 - ingve
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/09/android-studio-32.html
======
TekMol
I try Android Studio for a bit every now and then.

I have to say it's such a giant bloated thing that it really does not make me
want to write native code.

Fortunately, there is a lot of great stuff going on with Progressive Web Apps
now. I hope that they will be the future. Developing for the browser is so
much leaner.

~~~
watty
Developing for the browser is leaner but it's the opposite for end-users. I
hope PWAs are the future as well but native is still king for the time being.

~~~
TekMol
As a user, I _totally_ prefer a web app over a native app.

Man .. don't even get me started .. ok, here we go:

I can use it instantly.

I can remove it instantly.

The sandboxing is much better.

The privacy is much better.

I can link to it from wherever I like.

I can use it on all my devices.

I can copy text and images.

I can change the style (I often enlarge the font for example).

It can not use my battery / camera / phone when it's closed.

...

I feel like I can go on forever.

~~~
waivek
Do you use a web app or a native app for YouTube?

~~~
taeric
I switched to firefox on my android for both Facebook and Twitter. So far,
I've had very little downside to this.

~~~
cobookman
+1 dropped facebook native app for their web version. Never looked back.

I think the answer is some apps are better on web, others on native.

Videos / Music / Games / Email / Messaging are better native. For actual
reading of content (HN / Reddit / Twitter / Facebook ...etc) I find better on
the web.

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lokedhs
I have used IntelliJ IDEA since the early 2000's and used it for Android
development since Android first came out.

It used to be an amazing experience, and when the news came out that Google
was going to switch to IDEA for their official tools instead of going with
that Eclipse I was thrilled. Finally everybody was going to able to know just
how fast and efficient Android development can be.

How wrong I was. When Android Studio came out, it was incredible slow. Even
today, after years of improvement to the developer experience it still isn't
as efficient as plain IDEA was before Google created Android Studio.

I actually lay most of the blame on Gradle, which became mandatory around the
same time. I never thought that someone would create a buid tool I dislike
more than Maven, but it seems they succeeded.

~~~
russellbeattie
Gradle is pure insanity. Take a JVM-based scripting language that no one uses,
and base an entire build-tool around it - complete with a custom DSL - that is
so slow it needs to be run in the background as a service to be even somewhat
performant, and make sure that each new version somehow breaks older build
scripts so that you're constantly being prompted to update, and then being
prompted to fix whatever the update broke... It's honestly just pure,
unadulterated, crap.

~~~
jrs95
Maven is very unintuitive though, at least Gradle does a better job on the CLI
interface. Hopefully we'll get better options on the JVM in the future.

~~~
lokedhs
But you need to edit the Gradle configuration files. Most people simply cargo-
cult that, and while that works most of the time, it's incredibly non-
intuitive to solve problems.

~~~
jrs95
99% of the time this is just pasting one dependency line into a file, and a
Gradle file reads more intuitively than a Maven pom file. IMO performance
aside Maven really only excels in edge cases. Most projects would never see
any advantages from using Maven instead.

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mkhalil
Most exciting feature: App Bundles! At last, users with an Galaxy S5 won't
have to install the same APK as a Note S9. This will especially helpful to
users in countries where data is expensive, phones are old, and storage is
low. Also, I can see this ensuring users download through the app store, since
app pirates (most of the time, injecting trojans into free programs), will
have to upload many different APKs in order to "trick" users into installing
their APK.

The Energy Profiler is a nice addition, but I wish there was some incentive
for apps to be energy efficient (even an app store "badge" would be better
than nothing), since people will continue to just blame Android for the
battery performance and not the apps.

super-small-nit: It's Android Studio 3.2, but the installer's file name is
android-studio-ide-181.5014246-mac.dmg. android-studio-3.2.dmg would of been
just fine. I am guessing 181 is a build number, but as a user, I don't care
about what build number it is.

~~~
ivankolev
181 is actually 20(18)1st release, following the underlying IDEA version. They
lag behind one version, IDEA now is 182 and 183 is in early release
program(eap)

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dirtylowprofile
I have been using AS since the first beta came out and every release it is
just getting worst and slow on 16GB RAM.

While Xcode on the other hand 3-4 years ago it was liked developed by interns.
But Xcode 9-10 has been very fast and less buggy on my 16GB.

Developing for Android is not fun anymore for me. It is getting bloated.

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foobaw
Do the emulator and compiler still require SSDs and 16GB+ RAM to be usable? I
love Android Studio but it used to always feel very heavy-weight.

~~~
Jaruzel
16Gb, Standard HDD, Mid range i5 processor. It's sluggish as hell. Takes an
age to start up, the gui is slow, and compiling even a basic app taks forever,
with much disk thrashing.

I've given up, and recently uninstalled it. I'm going to try and develop
android apps using Xamarin in Visual Studio instead (as I have that anyway for
Windows dev).

~~~
pjmlp
I am on the same path, even though it makes me feel a bit like hypocrite given
my advocacy for native tooling vs third party, it actually does seem a better
path to sanity.

Either that or just live with mobile Web and its constraints.

~~~
yrio
I often read complaints that Xamarin is buggy (builds randomly stop working,
often need to restart Visual Studio, etc).

How's your personal experience with Xamarin? How's the tooling compared to
Android Studio?

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copperx
Ryzen support at last!

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jackameister
One nice feature that's somewhat buried in the notes is that the linter can
now warn against some Kotlin/Java interoperability problems. But you need to
turn the new inspections on manually:
[https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/#lint](https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/#lint)

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calferreira
In my opinion this a very exciting release. Google is really pushing to make
the platform better for everyone, users and developers.

Android App Bundles, Integration with Hyper-V and support for AMD are very
welcome.

Just wish using Android Studio required less ram and CPU, but to be honest,
IIRC developing with Java has always been a little demanding when it comes to
machine resources.

~~~
Alexendoo
There is quite a large downside to app bundles, that is that it requires you
(the developer) to hand over your app signing key to Google. The fact that
updates from the play store are signed end to end is pretty great in my
opinion, this doesn't apply so much if you give away your signing key.

As far as I can tell it's not a technical reason why they ask for your key -
bundletool [1] supports generating a set of signed APKs (.apks, APK set
archive) in the same way the play store would from an app bundle. Android
Studio's GUI could just as easily generate that to upload directly to the play
store instead of an app bundle. This would net the same benefits to the end
users and the same level of convenience to the developer, all whilst keeping
your private keys private.

[1] [https://developer.android.com/studio/command-
line/bundletool](https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/bundletool)

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netcraft
Is android studio a rebranded intellij?

~~~
stephenhuey
Yes

[https://jaxenter.com/android-studio-dumps-eclipse-for-
intell...](https://jaxenter.com/android-studio-dumps-eclipse-for-intellij-
idea-106065.html)

------
dafrankenstein2
well can anyone clarify what's the difference/relation between intel haxm and
microsoft hyper-v

~~~
jontro
Looks like haxm has the best performance, however you might want to use
hyper-v if you're running other hyper-v containers since it clashes...
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32226559/making-
hyper-v-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32226559/making-hyper-v-and-
intel-haxm-to-co-exist)

~~~
ivankolev
Newest windows versions allow running docker and the android emulator side by
side,through windows container platform

~~~
kristianp
Do you have a link to show how to do that? Sounds useful, but the only
reference I've found to that is to do it from Visual Studio and using Xamarin
C# and not 'native' Java.

~~~
ivankolev
Once you enable the container platform in windows, and enable the bios setting
for virtualization, it should just work, when I get back to my home computer I
will look the details

~~~
ivankolev
Alright, so I just made a run of it and verified it all works. As you say, the
tutorial from Microsoft is for VS[0], but it actually talks about the android
emulator, which is the same thing that Android Studio uses, just make sure you
update it to latest, atm it's 27.3.10 Admittedly, the startup time seems a bit
longer than with HAXM, but otherwise the emulation is pretty responsive.
[0][https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/android/get-
started...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/android/get-
started/installation/android-emulator/hardware-acceleration?pivots=windows)

