Release updates archive

Emulator 29.0.6 canary

Monday, April 29, 2019

Foldable emulators now load more quickly from snapshots.

Fixed issue where e2fsck did not run properly, leading to low disk space for AVDs on older API levels.

ConstraintLayout 2.0.0 alpha 5

Friday, April 26, 2019

We just released ConstraintLayout 2.0.0 alpha 5. It’s available from the google maven repository:
dependencies { implementation 'com.android.support.constraint:constraint-layout:2.0.0-alpha5' }
or if using the AndroidX packages:
dependencies { implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:2.0.0-alpha5' }
Documentation is available on https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/constraint/classes.htmlhttps://github.com/googlesamples/android-ConstraintLayoutExamples Changes

ConstraintLayout

New: Flow virtual layout

MotionLayout

Various fixes (layout updates)
Auto transition (autoTransition)
Derived Constraints (deriveConstraintsFrom)
OnSwipe regions (touchRegionId)
MotionTarget matching (layout_constraintTag, motionTarget)
OnSwipe without automatically completing (autoComplete=”false”)
If OnClick has no target id the MotionLayout is targeted

Flow Virtual layout

Flow is a virtual layout. It can be used within a ConstraintLayout and supports multiple ways of laying out the referenced widgets (create a single chain, or multiple chains to wrap around, or a table). The advantages of being a virtual layout compared to a normal viewgroups are that:

The layout hierarchy remains flat, simplifying runtime manipulations and animations
You can constrain the Flow widget as you would any other view.
You can constrain other views to views laid out by Flow.
Within MotionLayout you can animate views into and out of a flow virtual layout, change its orientation, etc.

Flow will lay out widgets either horizontally or vertically, depending on the value of the android:orientation attribute. The next important attribute to set is flow_wrapMode, which will control how the referenced widgets are laid out in the given orientation:

app:flow_wrapMode = “none” will create a single chain out of the referenced elements (default)
app:flow_wrapMode = “chain” will create multiple chains (one after the other) if the referenced elements do not fit in the available space
app:flow_wrapMode = “aligned” is a bit similar to wrap chain, but will align the elements, basically creating rows and columns

The way elements are positioned for the other orientation is controlled by flow_horizontalAlign and flow_verticalAlign attributes. For example, if specifying a horizontal orientation, use flow_verticalAlign to control the vertical positioning of the elements being laid out.

android:orientation = “horizontal|vertical” (default horizontal)
app:flow_horizontalStyle = "spread|spread_inside|packed" (default spread)
app:flow_verticalStyle = "spread|spread_inside|packed" (default spread)
app:flow_horizontalBias = "float" (default 0.5)
app:flow_verticalBias = "float" (default 0.5)
app:flow_horizontalGap = "dimension" (default 0)
app:flow_verticalGap = "dimension" (default 0)
app:flow_horizontalAlign = "start|end|center" (default center)
app:flow_verticalAlign = "top|bottom|center|baseline” (default center)
app:flow_maxElementsWrap = "integer" (default : 0, not applied)

New features of MotionLayout

We also added several new features to MotionLayout.

Auto Transition

Transitions can be made to automatically fire when MotionLayout reaches a state associated with that transition.

none - default value no transitions automatically
animateToStart - animate to the start state if you are at the end state
animateToEnd - animate to the end state if you are at the start state
jumpToEnd - Jump to the start state if you are at the start state
jumpToStart - Jump to the end state if you are at the end state

These can be combined to allow jumping to the end but smooth transition to the start.

<Transition

motion:constraintSetStart="@+id/end"

motion:constraintSetEnd="@+id/b"

motion:autoTransition="animateToEnd"

motion:motionInterpolator="easeIn"

motion:duration="1000"/>

Derived Constraints

Constraint sets can now be derived from other constraints sets. This can greatly reduce xml size. In a <ConstraintSet> can now have an attribute deriveConstraintsFrom which allows you to specify the id of another constraint set. This is useful for generating a series of constraints that only have small variations between them.

Note:

A constraint set represents the complete set of constraints for a layout
This works well in conjunction with the newer PropertySet, Layout, Transform syntax
All ConstraintSets derive from from the MotionLayout by default

</ConstraintSet>

<Constraint

android:id="@id/region1">

<PropertySet

motion:visibility="gone"/>

</Constraint>

</ConstraintSet>

<ConstraintSet android:id="@+id/state2"

motion:deriveConstraintsFrom="@id/state1">

<Constraint

android:id="@id/region2">

<PropertySet

motion:visibility="gone"/>

</Constraint>

</ConstraintSet>

OnSwipe regions

OnSwipe now takes an attribute touchRegionId which limits the starting point of the bounds of that view.

Note:

The view pointed to by the id can be invisible
Quite often the region is the same as the anchor.
This allows two Transition swipes to be in effect in the same direction normally each transition is in a different direction.

<OnSwipe

motion:dragDirection="dragDown"

motion:touchAnchorId="@+id/region2"

motion:touchRegionId="@+id/region2"

motion:touchAnchorSide="top" />

Swipe without autocomplete

OnSwipe Automatically completes the transition choosing the direction and animating smoothly to a stop. Sometimes this feature is not desired and can be turned off.

You can use this to implement things like a custom slider.

<OnSwipe

motion:dragDirection="dragRight"

motion:autoComplete="false"

motion:touchAnchorId="@+id/button"

motion:touchAnchorSide="right" />

Emulator 29.0.5 Canary

Friday, April 26, 2019

Fixed a long-standing issue with the Windows emulator where sub-processes (such as adb commands) failed to start if the username had spaces in it.

Foldable emulator now preserves folded/unfolded state across snapshot saves and loads.

Improved error message and added links to documentation on hypervisor setup if hypervisor initialization fails.

Fixed missing initialization of RCU in HAXM vCPU threads. This can possibly address some crashes and race conditions.

Fixed crash that happened in certain patterns of saving and loading snapshots from the snapshots UI in recent Q system images.

Fixed issue where virtual scene camera was blank because emulated device state would be initialized improperly from snapshot if an AR macro was playing while that snapshot was saved.

Android Studio 3.5 Canary 13 available

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Canary or Dev channelHelp > Check for UpdatesAndroid Studio > Check for Updatesdownload it here Known issuesdownload General fixesAndroid Studio UI

Issue #124025065: Icon selection window improvements

Core IDE

Issue #128271323: Can't open AVD manager from the landing window (when there are no open projects)

Issue #130166128: Reduce usage of VirtualFile.getFileType in PsiProjectListener

Issue #130166139: Clean up PsiProjectListener.isRelevantFile and AndroidResourceFilesListener.shouldScheduleUpdate

Data Binding

Issue #122464849: DataBinding - Layout "class" attribute in "data" tag throws error

Issue #117607324: xml code completion does not recognize Observable / LiveData

Issue #119645762: DataBinding fails for transitive deps.

Deployment

Issue #130168866: New deployment flow with identical devices should show serial numbers

Issue #129078765: Investigate why fixConfigurationsMissingBeforeRunTask can fail

Gradle

Issue #129758703: Deprecate useProguard in DSL

Issue #130296666: BooleanOption warnings (experimental/deprecated) should be only displayed once

Kotlin

Issue #121022032: Separate test scopes are broken in Kotln

Project System

Issue #130053180: PSD shouldn't suggest upgrading from stable library to unstable library

Android Studio Preview release notesreporting a bugvote for an existing issue

Emulator 29.0.4 Canary

Monday, April 22, 2019

Added back the -gpu angle_indirect rendering option for Windows.

Linux: We have found that on certain host kernels, the guest Android kernel can error out and exit in KVM with a "hardware error." We now abort() the emulator when this happens in order to increase debuggability (previously, it just hung).

Linux: For convenience with CI setups, added command line option -stdouterr-file <file-name> to redirect both stdout and stderr to a file.

To improve reliability of multiple emulator instances, if launching multiple instances of the emulator with -read-only, sometimes the previous writable emulator instance is not yet done cleaning up stale files. The emulator now retries to launch multiple instances 3 times over 3 seconds in that case.

Fixed parsing of -allow-host-audio command line option.

Emulator 29.0.3 Canary

Friday, April 19, 2019

Fixed keyboard input focus issue on xfce. Issue 1 Issue 2
Foldable UI: Added console commands to fold/unfold foldable AVDs:

adb emu fold
adb emu unfold

AR Macro UI: Fixed displayed state in the UI when macro stops playing.
Removed message qemu_ram_alloc_user_backed on startup.
More logging added when OpenGL initialization fails.
Fixed several crashes and synchronization issues.

Linux emulator: gRPC service

We'd like to make the emulator as versatile as possible, allowing host GPU rendering and interactivity in the widest range of running contexts.

CI and remote desktop users have the following long-standing pain points:

Programmatically sending input commands to the emulator involves running adb shell commands which can be high overhead, or using the telnet console, which is faster, but may not work with certain network setups.
CI users often run emulators headless, which can make it difficult to notice issues that require the screen being visible or even interactive.
Remote desktop users often cannot run with host GPU rendering and also interact with the emulator as GPU rendering is often set up to be tied to the non-virtual displays.

To address this, we've added the capability for the Linux emulator to also serve a gRPC service. gRPC is a general framework for RPC that works over HTTP.

Note: This is still experimental stage and is meant to be used from the same machine the emulator is running on; please do not run the service truly remotely unless you know the security implications!
The emulator gRPC service is disabled by default but can be activated via the command line

-grpc <port>

where <port> is the port over which to serve gRPC requests, usually 5556. Like with anything else that is starting a server, do not run the service if you do not have <port> secured from remote users!

Once the service is started, gRPC commands can then be issued from clients. The set of commands is captured in the protobuf here. The current set of commands allows both sending input events and receiving screenshots, addressing the pain points:

Input commands can be sent to the emulator with low overhead over HTTP which will work across more network setups.
Even if the emulator is running headless, screenshot gRPC requests can be sent to query the current screen. For interactivity, input events can also be sent back to the emulator.
Remote desktop users can then run the emulator headless on the main display with GPU accelerated rendering while using gRPC to get screenshots and send input events in order to interact with the emulator.

To get started, we also provide a few example clients here. There is:

A Go-based service that can be used to query emulator states.
A React app that demonstrates remote interactivity via screenshot and input RPCs. Note: the React example requires that protobuf version 3.7.0+ be built and found on the system.

In the near term, we will work on a higher performance streaming solution to getting screenshots.

Android Studio 3.5 Canary 12 available

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Canary or Dev channelHelp > Check for UpdatesAndroid Studio > Check for Updatesdownload it here useProGuard Android Gradle plugin setting deprecateduseProguardgradle.properties# Include this flag only if you want to use ProGuard instead of R8 # to shrink your code. android.enableR8 = false Known issuesdownload General fixesAndroid Studio UI

Issue #111960180: Android Studio hangs in UI thread (loading Android SDK)

C++ Sync

Issue #122875116: Build variants are generated for every ABI though not supposed to

Core IDE

Issue #123271590: Remove AndroidResourceFileListener

Issue #130029005: possible bug in com.android.ide.common.resources.DataItem

Data Binding

Issue #37150098: Android Studio shows warning: Element merge is not allowed here

Editing

Issue #129323345: Code Formatting changes the order of components in Layout hierarchy

Gradle

Issue #125696148: Build error when referencing Kotlin Multi Platform module in the project with Dynamic feature module

Issue #129319471: Sync error: Variant must exist

Issue #129910310: Dex merging task may ignore bytecode produced using Variant API

Issue #125166026: Feature plugin doesn't always generate R.txt file in Gradle Build Plugin 3.3.*

Gradle Sync

Issue #123557209: "Skip source generation on Gradle sync" should be respected when cleaning the project

Navigation Editor

Issue #127905301: Subclasses of NavHostFragment are not displayed in the destination tab as hosts

Project System

Issue #123032843: IDE integration with the Gradle buildSrc module is broken in Android Studio 3.3

Issue #118392606: Unresolved buildSrc objects starting with 3.3

Test Support

Issue #123892382: Running UI tests with wrong buildType fails with unclear error

Android Studio Preview release notesreporting a bugvote for an existing issue

Android Studio 3.4 available in the Stable channel

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

download it hererelease notesblog post

Android Studio 3.5 Canary 11 available

Monday, April 15, 2019

Canary or Dev channelHelp > Check for UpdatesAndroid Studio > Check for Updatesdownload it here Smart editor support for AndroidX Preference libraryAndroidX Preference library Known issuesdownload General fixesAVD Manager

Issue #129338679: AVD managers suggests internal storage size way too big

Issue #123531078: Inconsistent navigation behavior from generated binding object between Java and Kotlin Project

Issue #129092517: Add lint error for missing kapt plugin in build.gradle.kts files

Data Binding

Issue #123379503: Changing element in does not change binding for kotlin files until Rebuild project.

Debugger

Issue #128579793: Cannot resolve symbol problem in XML in AS 3.4 RC 1

Editing

Issue #123863053: Debugger fails to install / act on PC for a given line.

Android Studio Preview release notesreporting a bugvote for an existing issue

Emulator 29.0.2 Canary

Friday, April 12, 2019

Foldable UI: Moved fold/unfold button to the right-side toolbar.

Fixed issue where the default Settings sub-page in the Extended Controls would be at Advanced instead of General.

Emulator 29.0.1 Canary

Friday, April 5, 2019

Android Q Beta 2: Foldable Hardware ProfilesAndroid Q Beta 2Android Studio 3.5 Canary 10

7.3” Foldable: 1536x2152 & folded: 4.6” 840x1960
8” Foldable: 2200x2480 & folded: 6.6” 1480x2480

Please ensure you have the latest (rev 2+) version of Android Q system images along with Android Studio 3.5 Canary 10+, as foldable UI will not work properly with earlier versions.

Foldable hardware profiles can be selected in the AVD manager in Studio 3.5 Canary 10+:

A new panel is added to the left side of the emulator UI allowing control of whether the device is in folded or unfolded state. The panel itself can be toggled on and off in Extended Controls > Settings.

Android Q Beta 2: Vulkan 1.0 (Windows, Linux)
If you are using a Windows or Linux machine with a modern GPU (Intel HD 5xx+, AMD 4xx+/Vega, NVIDIA GTX 5xx+) , the Q Beta 2 system image supports running Vulkan 1.0 apps. This is currently a rough, experimental level of support where snapshots and Android Vulkan UI are not supported yet, but allows testing individual Android Vulkan apps. To enable, add the following lines to ~/.android/advancedFeatures.ini:

Vulkan = on GLDirectMem = on

In a future Android Q system image update, Vulkan 1.1 will be supported (the host side emulator bits in 29.0.x already support Vulkan 1.1), and we will also support running the Android UI renderer (Skia) on Vulkan backend for GPUs that have the OpenGL/Vulkan interop extension GL_EXT_memory_object (Most AMD/NVIDIA GPUs, but not Intel).

Known issue: HAXM can sometimes fail to map Vulkan coherent memory to the guest and shuts down the emulator. This will be addressed in an upcoming HAXM update.

The following are changes specific to the emulator that are independent of Q system images:
Linux: Packaging more shared libraries
The headless build of the emulator allows running the emulator on a wide variety of Linux systems, but even with the non-headless (headful?) build of the emulator, we're still working to make sure the Linux emulator can run on a wide variety of systems. In 29.0.1, we now also package libxkbcommon.so with the Linux emulator. This allows the emulator to run on a wider variety of Linux systems.
If the emulator does not launch for you on Linux, please try to run it from the command line with -verbose -no-snapshot and having the environment variable LD_DEBUG=all set, and file a report in Issuetracker so we can add any other shared libraries that might be missing (or fix the issue if it's not because of missing shared libraries).
Foldable UI improvements

Fixed issue where foldable hardware profile AVD was created, but foldable UI did not show up by default.
Fixed issue where left side panel would disappear when restoring the emulator from a minimized state.
Corrected button help string for the fold button in the left panel.
Fixed tooltip for the fold button.
Added keyboard shortcuts to fold and unfold:

Ctrl (Command on macOS) + F: Fold
Ctrl (Command on macOS) + U: Unfold

AR Macro UI improvements

Fixed issue where video would sometimes keep playing if the selected macro was changed.
Improved the UI layout.

Other Changes

Fixed issue where on older API levels (< 26), the screen would turn off unexpectedly. This was due to setting the emulator on battery power, but the adb command to set screen off timeout did not go through reliably on these system images.
Fixed issue where -partition-size command line option would not set the data partition size even after -wipe-data.
glReadPixels GL_IMPLEMENTATION_COLOR_READ_TYPE will now use the host GPU's result instead of an emulated one, which can fix issues with images/assets not showing up because of improper format for readback. More details
We no longer use Qt libraries to get the monitor dimensions as it is unreliable. Instead, we use the platform's native windowing libraries to do so.
Because Android Q seems to require much more RAM in the device compared to previous Android versions, we've bumped up the minimum RAM size for Android Q to 2 GB. Note that this is still not enough to keep lowmemorykiller from tripping (4 GB is needed to avoid lowmemorykiller events) but is a compromise between the emulator itself becoming extremely slow due to low RAM versus the host system running out of RAM (which is worse).

Edit: This may be improved in the future with compressed RAM enabled for the emulator.

Fixed issue where Vulkan loader was not packaged with the Linux emulator.
AR Macro UI now sends metrics on usage if user has opted in to metrics from Studio.
Fixed possible concurrency issue when copy/pasting text into the emulator.
Fixed possible concurrency issue when querying GL strings.

ConstraintLayout 2.0.0 alpha 4

Thursday, April 4, 2019

We just released ConstraintLayout 2.0.0 alpha 4. It’s available from the google maven repository:

dependencies {

implementation 'com.android.support.constraint:constraint-layout:2.0.0-alpha4'

}

or if using the AndroidX packages:

dependencies {

implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:2.0.0-alpha4'

}

Documentation is available on https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/constraint/classes.html

Changes

This release contains various bug fixes and performance improvements:

ConstraintLayout

Dynamic feature modules fix when using barriers and helpers
Chain fixes (bias with gone elements, RTL fixes)
Barrier fixes (RTL behavior, now can use a margin on a Barrier)
match_constraints fixes (max support, bias, percent…)
setTag/getTag on Group was fixed
ConstraintSet::setGoneMargin() for Top/Bottom
baseline behavior on gone
wrap behavior fixes

MotionLayout

Visibility fixes
Flickering issues / jump issues fixed
Various match_constraints issues fixed
Custom color interpolation (alpha was incorrectly handled)
Better barrier / helpers support

New Features

We also added several new features to MotionLayout:

Richer behaviors for OnClick actions
CustomAttributes support for customPixelDimensions
ImageFilterView overlay support
KeyTrigger collision support
Attributes rename

OnClick

OnClick now supports a richer set of behaviours

Toggle - animate back and forth ( = transitionToEnd|transitionToStart)
transitionToEnd - animate to the end state
transitionToStart - animate to the start state
jumpToEnd - Jump to the end state
jumpToStart - Jump to the start state

These can be combined to allow jumping to the end but smooth transition to the start.

<OnClick motion:targetId="@id/button_west"

motion:clickAction="transitionToEnd|transitionToStart"/>

<OnClick motion:targetId="@id/button_south"

motion:clickAction="jumpToStart|transitionToEnd"/>

CustomPixelDimensions

Used when the method takes pixels such as setTextSize(...)

<CustomAttribute

motion:attributeName="textSize"

motion:customPixelDimension="2dp" />

ImageFilterView

New tag overlay - true(default) / false affects crossfade behaviour set to false to crossfade transparent objects.

KeyTrigger collision support

You can fire a KeyTrigger on collision with another view.

<KeyTrigger

motion:motionTarget="@id/button"

motion:motion_triggerOnCollision ="@id/button2"

motion:onPositiveCross="callOnClick"

motion:motion_postLayoutCollision="true"

motion_triggerOnCollision - Id of view to check collision with
motion_postLayoutCollision tested including layout or layout+transform
onPositiveCross Trigger on entering collision state
onNegativeCross Trigger on leaving the collision state
onCross Trigger on entering or leaving the collision state

Rename

To minimize the chance of name clashes with 3p libraries we have renamed attributes that were clashing or had a good chance of clashing.

Old	New
<OnClick app:mode="toggle" app:target="@+id/button" />	<OnClick app:clickAction="toggle" app:targetId="@+id/button" />
<Transition motion:constraintSetStart="@+id/start" motion:constraintSetEnd="@+id/end" motion:nterpolator="easeIn" motion:duration="1000">	<Transition motion:constraintSetStart="@+id/start" motion:constraintSetEnd="@+id/end" motion:motionInterpolator="easeIn" motion:duration="1000">
motion:duration="123"	motion:defaultDuration="123"
motion:interpolator="easeInOut"	motion:motionInterpolator="easeInOut"
motion:progress="0.3"	motion:motionProgress="0.3"
In <OnClick> motion:target="@+id/button"	In <OnClick> motion:targetId="@+id/button"
In <Key* motion:target="0.3"	In <Key* motion:motionTarget="0.3"
motion:elevation="0.3" motion:rotation="0.3" motion:rotationX="0.3" motion:rotationY="0.3" motion:scaleX="0.3" motion:scaleY="0.3" motion:transformPivotX="0.3" motion:transformPivotY="0.3" motion:translationX="0.3" motion:translationY="0.3" motion:translationZ="0.3"	android:elevation="0.3" android:rotation="0.3" android:rotationX="0.3" android:rotationY="0.3" android:scaleX="0.3" android:scaleY="0.3" android:transformPivotX="0.3" android:transformPivotY="0.3" android:translationX="0.3" android:translationY="0.3" android:translationZ="0.3"
motion:transitionPathRotate="0.3"	motion:motionPathRotate="0.3"

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