
Google Launches Android Studio 2.0 - Garbage
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/23/android-studio-2-0-with-improved-android-emulator-and-instant-run/
======
talloaktrees
"Instant Run lets developers build and deploy their apps once (both to the
emulator or to a physical device) and then as they change their code and
deploy it, it’ll only take a second or two before they can see those changes
in the running app. This feature will work for all apps that target Ice Cream
Sandwich and later. Cuthbertson politely refused to tell us how exactly
Instant Run works, but promised that Google will detail the technology behind
this feature in the future."

This could be awesome, if it works as advertised.

~~~
nohawp
I just tried it, it works pretty well. You can also ask it to relaunch the
activity.

~~~
nerdwaller
I've had hit and miss results so far, sometimes it's great and then a bunch of
times it ends up launching the app twice. Perhaps I'm either doing something
wrong or I'm not hitting the right use when this works flawlessly. So far,
however, hit and miss with little clear reason.

~~~
whatever_dude
My hypothesis is that launching the app twice actually means it's crashing the
app.

When the app is running, and you do an instant run from Android Studio, it
will try doing the hot swap. The app crashes and immediately relaunches (and
it's the same build). All the while Android Studio is monitoring the app task
and waiting for the hot swap to take place. It keeps checking, times out after
a few seconds (realizing it didn't update successfully), and _then_ it deploys
and launches the new APK, as a last resort.

My point is to be careful when testing if you're getting the double launches,
because the first time it is launched, it's still the old APK.

------
benmarten
Here's the link to the Download page:
[http://tools.android.com/download/studio/builds/2-0-preview](http://tools.android.com/download/studio/builds/2-0-preview)

It's not in the stable channel yet, so I assume it's not really released for
the broad public yet?

~~~
xd1936
This is why TechCrunch isn't great. Here are the actual details:

[http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/11/android-
studi...](http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/11/android-
studio-20-preview.html)

It's in Canary right now.

~~~
benmarten
Good catch. Here's what Google says: "Since this initial release is a preview,
you may want to download and run an additional copy of Android Studio in
parallel with your current version."

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angry-hacker
Sorry for off topic but why does every news site mobile layout wants me to
click read more/continue reading? Now techcrunch too. I tried to Google the
question but didn't get an answer.. Who and why invented this trend?

Is it to measure engagement? Surely there are better ways.. Most of the sites
don't lazy load the hidden content, so there's no bandwidth benefit either...

~~~
des429
Could be a performance/turnover-rate thing. If they only have to send a small
bite of the article in the beginning, it means a smaller response body, which
means the page will load faster. You are less likely to close the page in
frustration as it continues to load.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I don't think this is the reason. The amount of text that is contained in the
article is usually smaller than the shit ton of superfluous JS and images
they're sending. If they're looking to optimize page load, there are lower-
hanging fruits.

------
nathanb
Can someone explain this to me?

Windows version: x64

Mac OSX version: x64

Linux version: x86

Why? Why do companies not release 64-bit versions of their programs for Linux?
This seems to happen all the time, and it utterly baffles me.

~~~
babuskov
Most probably the developers working on Linux port run 32 bit Linux themselves
because of compatibility with some closed-source programs. ;)

I have no idea about the real reason, it's just a wild guess.

------
itafroma
Official announcement on the Android Dev blog: [http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/2015/11/android-studi...](http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/2015/11/android-studio-20-preview.html)

------
phjesusthatguy3
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q="amazingly+stabled"](https://duckduckgo.com/?q="amazingly+stabled")

Did TC have the best rewritten press release? There doesn't seem to be any
mention of 2.0 on
[http://developer.android.com/tools/studio/index.html](http://developer.android.com/tools/studio/index.html)
for example.

~~~
whatever_dude
It won't be there for a while. It _should_ be on
[http://tools.android.com/recent](http://tools.android.com/recent) soon (it
should have been already, but I guess they were waiting for the conference to
start before putting it there).

------
bndw
Is there any reason to hold out for a non Java/JVM Android development
experience? I remember rumors of Dart or Python, but those seem to have died.

~~~
on_and_off
Java is the language of the platform for the foreseeable future. You might
want to check out something like Kotlin (great language which compiles to java
bytecode) but IMO there is little reason to invest in Dart for Android right
now.

It is heralded by the Dart team, entirely independently from the Android team.
AFAIK, they are just shopping for a problem to solve with Dart now that they
are not going to be able to ship their VM with Chrome.

~~~
spankalee
You might be referring to Flutter, which is a project of Chrome, started
independently from Dart, and who's purpose is to make the core of Chrome
better for app development, not find a purpose for Dart.

Flutter started with JS as the scripting language. The Dart team is certainly
lending a lot of support to Flutter, because of the promise of a compelling
mobile story for Dart.

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siegecraft
Does anyone know how this compares to the speed of running apps under
something like genymotion? It basically creates an android device in
virtualbox. The speed blew me away compared to the old android virtual
devices. Granted, I hadn't messed with android development for a couple of
years before that, so it's possible everything is that much faster now..

~~~
vickychijwani
Instant Run is different from Genymotion. With both, you should be able to get
< 1s compile + deploy times if you're making a change supported by Instant
Run. On my 3 years old Linux laptop and a Nexus 4, Instant Run compiles and
deploys within 2 seconds :)

------
LegNeato
Instant run sounds a bit like Buck's exopackage:

[https://buckbuild.com/article/exopackage.html](https://buckbuild.com/article/exopackage.html)

Although the example they show is editing a resource, so it could be fast-
pathing resource-only edits (buck does that too).

More docs here:

[https://sites.google.com/a/android.com/tools/tech-
docs/insta...](https://sites.google.com/a/android.com/tools/tech-docs/instant-
run)

------
swah
Offtopic: is the experience as good on Windows and Linux as on OSX? I'm
planning on selling the MBP (too expensive to keep hardware up-to-date in
third-world countries).

~~~
wjoe
Works fine on Linux. The IDE is Java based and it packages all the necessary
tools with it so it should work fine anywhere.

~~~
georgemcbay
Eclipse is Java based and packages all the necessary tools with it but it is
extremely debatable whether that means it "works fine" anywhere...

But to address the grandparent post a bit more directly, in my experience
Android Studio runs great under both Windows and Linux, I've used it
frequently on both with no complaints.

The instant run feature this new canary build has will be welcome since the
deploy->run cycle has always been just slow enough to feel like a bottleneck
to me, though I never faulted Android Studio for this.

~~~
karussell
What has this to do with Eclipse? Android studio is IntelliJ based.

~~~
georgemcbay
Is it really so hard to understand? I was responding to a specific comment
which was:

"Works fine on Linux. The IDE is Java based and it packages all the necessary
tools with it so it should work fine anywhere."

Eclipse fits all those criteria (IDE is Java based and it packages all the
necessary tools with it). But I would argue Eclipse doesn't "work fine"
anywhere, it is a bloated, slow piece of crap (equally, everywhere), thus
those criteria are not really that useful in determining if something "works
fine" somewhere.

~~~
macavity23
As a ten year (now-cured) Java/J2EE developer, I whole-heartedly agree with
you that Eclipse is a bloated, slow piece of crap.

IntelliJ is much better, very quick and responsive. It's actually a great
demonstration of how Java apps don't NEED to be slow PsOS. I'm an iOS guy and
didn't know about Android Studio, and the prospect of going back to Eclipse
has kept me from even thinking about Android dev. Now I might well give it
another try.

------
Mithaldu
Is there any chance of Java 8 support landing anytime soon?

~~~
oblio
Google is probably very wary of going more into Oracle territory.

Given Android's adoption at this point, if I were Google's management, I'd
adopt another JVM language. Sort of Objective-C -> Swift. Kotlin would
probably the safest bet from an "easy adoption" point of view.

~~~
gsnedders
Given they don't have a JVM, I don't think anything makes adopting a JVM
language easier.

~~~
s73v3r
I think that's pretty disingenuous. Just because they don't call it Java
doesn't mean they don't have a JVM.

~~~
needusername
Not implementing the JVM spec means it's not a JVM. It's that simple.

~~~
Rotten194
OK but you're straying into pedantry. They have their own VM which runs
bytecode generated by a translation layer. The only language supported by that
translation layer is JVM bytecode. Therefore, they effectively have an
implementation of the JVM.

~~~
kuhn
Actually ART runs DEX bytecode not JVM bytecode so I'd argue it's not a JVM at
all. By your definition anything that can translate Java to an intermediate
representation is a JVM. Does that make LLVM a JVM?

[https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/java/trunk/docs/java-
front...](https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/java/trunk/docs/java-frontend.txt)

~~~
wstrange
I am guessing Oracle's lawyers will argue that is indeed the case. Let's hope
they do not prevail

~~~
gsnedders
They lost that argument against Google already.

------
rifung
I wonder if these capabilities will come to the few of us who still prefer the
command line or if we'll be forced to upgrade.

~~~
tjohns
Instant Run only works from within Android Studio.

We still support command line builds (and will continue to do so). However, as
I understand it, there wasn't an easy way for us to deploy an incremental
build from the command line, as this takes advantage of an integration with
the IDE.

Of course, both Android Studio and the build system are open source, so you're
free to take a look at how it's done.

~~~
badlogic
Will it be supported in the IJ Android plugin, say within IJ CE/Ultimate?

------
eggy
I am torn between this and CodeWorks for Android by NVIDIA. I realize
CodeWorks is more for game devs, and carries a lot of GPU support, but it is a
one-click install and ties nicely into MS Visual Studio.

------
iLoch
Does the emulator support high density displays yet? It's been like 4 years.

------
msoad
Video of announcement during Android Dev Summit:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYin_N6xXxQ&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYin_N6xXxQ&feature=youtu.be)

Skip to ~1:00:00

------
RegW
> One area Google has recently focused on is app indexing, which brings
> content from apps into its search engine

Hmm. I wonder if the search engine is going to phone home anything it finds
interesting in your local files.

------
seanwilson
I have to admit, I vastly prefer web development right now as waiting at least
30 seconds for your native Android app to compile and run on a device really
sucks the fun out of it for me compared to just refreshing a browser.
Hopefully the live reload feature improves this!

~~~
vickychijwani
Exactly my thoughts. I've been working with native Android apps for 2 years
now and I still miss the Web's awesome feedback cycle.

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smegel
It's a preview. 1.5 just comes out a short while ago.

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sunasra
The best part they solved is improved compilation speed!

~~~
V-2
By my experience (based on the project I'm working on) regular build speed
hasn't changed at all. Obviously I'm not saying there's no improvement, only
that apparently it's not universal.

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zatkin
Google has the resource to build their own text editor -- so why don't they do
it? It seems displeasing to have to work with 3rd party software in order to
develop an Android app. And this is not to say IntelliJ is a bad choice, but
it would seem that they could rid away with any extraneous portions of the
editor. It could also be optimized for Android development, unless that's what
this "Android Studio" is.

~~~
gamesbrainiac
> Google has the resource to build their own text editor -- so why don't they
> do it?

Because they realize that reinventing the wheel for the sake of being 100%
google-made is a pointless endeavor.

> It seems displeasing to have to work with 3rd party software in order to
> develop an Android app.

People work with third party apps all the time in the development of
applications whether they are mobile, web or something else entirely.

>And this is not to say IntelliJ is a bad choice, but it would seem that they
could rid away with any extraneous portions of the editor. It could also be
optimized for Android development, unless that's what this "Android Studio"
is.

How is it not optimized for android development. What, in your opinion would
be an optimized version of the current IDE?

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caskance
Does Microsoft really not care when competitors release their own IDEs called
* Studio?

~~~
Mikeb85
Pretty sure it doesn't matter, considering "Studio" is a common term...

~~~
caskance
So is "Word". I would be equally surprised if Google released word processing
software called "Android Word".

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yincrash
WordPerfect existed before MS Word

~~~
caskance
Which is clearly a different trademark despite the fact that they share one
word that is key to describing the product's functionality. Might as well
compare Burger King and Whataburger.

