Android Studio Hedgehog is here to help polish apps for Android 14

Summary

• Android Studio 2023.1.1 Hedgehog is the latest version of Google’s official IDE, aimed at helping developers improve app performance.
• The update includes features like App Quality Insights and Power Profiler to make it easier for developers to address issues and optimize their code.
• Hedgehog also brings UI updates and improvements to screen mirroring and the Layout Inspector, making the development process more efficient.

Android would be nothing without all the apps available for the mobile operating system. Google can’t solely rely on its first-party services to fill all use cases. To make the process as easy as possible for everyone building Android apps, the company offers Android Studio as its official Integrated Developer Environment (IDE). The latest version, Android Studio 2023.1.1 Hedgehog, is now rolling out in stable.

As Google describes in its Android Developers resources, the new version of the IDE wants to help developers improve their apps’ performance. App Quality Insights now include Android vitals data from the Play Console, allowing developers to see crash reports from apps published in the Play Store. This makes it easy to understand issues users may be facing and fix them right in a single workflow. Similarly, the new Power Profiler lets developers understand how much power certain actions within their apps drain on devices and pinpoint possible opportunities to create more efficient code.

Google is forcing developers to update their apps to target newer versions of Android or face a soft ban from the Play Store, with apps no longer available for installation if they’re too outdated. With its SDK Upgrade Assistant, Google wants to make the process of targeting newer Android versions easier for developers. The Hedgehog update extends the functionality with support for upgrading projects to Android 14 (or API Level 34, to use the correct term). Thanks to new relevance filters, unnecessary steps are automatically removed from the process.

Hedgehog also includes updates to the UI, optimizing certain aspects of the big redesign part of the Giraffe release in July 2023. There are improvements to the compact mode, vertical and horizontal splitting, and projects tabs on macOS. When mirroring screens from physical devices, developers need to touch them even less. There are new actions like screen rotation, folding and unfolding, changing the volume, and a few more. The Layout Inspector can run right in the Running Devices tool window with Hedgehog, saving some space and making the layout review process much faster.

The new version of the IDE is available for download from Android Developers right now. Google also provides in-depth release notes for Android Studio Hedgehog.