Android Studio 3.5 Canary 12 is now available in the Canary and Dev channels.

If you have Android Studio set to receive updates on the Canary or Dev channel, you can get the update by choosing Help > Check for Updates (Android Studio > Check for Updates on macOS). Otherwise, you can download it here.

useProGuard Android Gradle plugin setting deprecated

When using Android Gradle plugin 3.5.0-alpha12 and higher, the build system no longer respects the useProguard property to determine which code shrinker you want to use. By default, the Android Studio build system uses the R8 compiler to shrink, obfuscate, and optimize your code. However, if you’d like to instead use ProGuard, include the following property in your gradle.properties file: 

# Include this flag only if you want to use ProGuard instead of R8
# to shrink your code.
android.enableR8 = false

Known issues

Due to a bug in 3.5 Canary 8, no patches are available from that version to any other. If you are using Canary 8 and want to upgrade, please download the IDE. We apologize for any inconvenience.

General fixes

This update includes fixes for the following public issues:

Android Studio UI
C++ Sync
  • Issue #122875116: Build variants are generated for every ABI though not supposed to
Core IDE
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
For information on new features and changes in all preview builds of Android Studio 3.5, see the Android Studio Preview release notes. For details of bugs fixed in each preview release, see previous entries on this blog.

We greatly appreciate your bug reports, which help us to make Android Studio better. If you encounter a problem, let us know by reporting a bug. Note that you can also vote for an existing issue to indicate that you are also affected by it.