May 05, 2021 1 min read

The latest release of Android Studio brings its IntelliJ IDEA platform up-to-date and introduces a number of features aimed at improving developer experience. Android Studio 4.2 also includes a migration assistant to make it easier for developers to upgrade their projects and take advantage of the latest Android Gradle Plugin API.

The latest IntelliJ IDEA introduced many improvements in the areas of Java support, editor, version control, and third-party framework support.

In particular, IntelliJ IDEA 2020.2 fully supports Java 15, released last September, including Records, Sealed Classes, and Text Blocks. It also improves on-the-fly compiler hints and exception analysis, extends variable refactoring, and more. Speaking of version control, IntelliJ IDEA 2020.2 enables handling the entire GitHub PR workflow, from browsing and assigning PRs to merging them.

To make it easier for developers to adopt Android Studio 4.2, Google has created a new Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) Assistant which aims to simplify the process of migrating existing projects to AGP 4.2, included in the latest Android Studio.

The assistant allows you to toggle the commands that will be executed on your project to upgrade to a higher version of AGP, preview exactly which files will be affected by the AGP upgrade, and lastly globally update deprecated configurations.

Android Gradle Plugin 4.2 improves resource compilation time, especially on Windows machines, and introduces support for the APK v3 and APK v4 signing formats.

The new assistant also aims to ease transition to the upcoming Android Gradle Plugin 7. AGP 7, currently in alpha, stabilizes a number of new APIs that were introduced experimentally in AGP 4.1 and 4.2, including the androidComponents blocks. AGP 7 also raises the minimum supported Java version to Java 11 and adopts semantic versioning, while also aligning its version number to Gradle's. So, AGP 7.x is meant to work along with Gradle 7.x and will not follow Android Studio's versioning.

Other notable changes in Android Studio 4.2 are a new Project Wizard and Module Wizard, database inspector improvements, better tracing support, improved system trace, and so on.

You can get the latest Android Studio either by upgrading your existing install or downloading it anew.

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