Coming at the end of an eight-month development cycle, Project Marble, the latest release of Android Studio, refrains from adding new major features and opts instead for improving performance and memory efficiency.
Based on feedback from developers, Google Android Studio team tackled three core areas of Android official IDE: system health, feature polish, and bugs.
In the area of system health, Android Studio 3.5 includes a new infrastructure aimed to better detect performance problems and to improve the process of analyzing developer feedback and bug reports. Thanks to these changes, Android Studio is now also able to detect when it needs more memory and to notify you to increase allocated memory on systems where it is available.
Speaking of performance improvements, Android 3.5 includes a number of significant changes, such as improved typing responsiveness with XML-formatted data and Kotlin; support for incremental builds for annotation processors such as Glide, AndroidX data binding, Dagger, Realm, and Kotlin; faster disk access on Windows systems; reduced CPU usage for the Android emulator; faster linting, and more.
Android Studio 3.5 removes Instant run, a feature aimed to speed up the edit-build-run cycle by directly modifying the APK and only relaunching the app or restarting the currently running activity if required. Instead, the latest Android Studio version provides a new feature called Apply changes, which does not tamper with the APK and uses instead platform-specific APIs available on Oreo and later on Android versions to achieve the same result, while ensuring more stability and consistency.
As a last note, Android Studio fixes over 600 bugs, 50 memory leaks, and 20 IDE hangs, with over 40 external contributions. For a full list of changes, do not miss the release notes. Android Studio 3.5 is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Previous versions can be updated from within the app itself.
Project Marble does not end Google's effort to improve Android Studio performance and quality, remarked Google Android Studio team member Tor Norbye, and further polishing and improvements are expected in the next release, Android Studio 3.6.