The Android improvement workforce took a break from including main options to the Android Emulator over the past six months to give attention to an initiative known as Venture Quartz, the objective of which was to enhance the steadiness, pace, and efficiency of the platform.
Now, the workforce is reporting the enhancements it was in a position to make to the Android Emulator, which may now be skilled both by downloading the newest model of Android Studio or updating to the newest model of the Emulator within the SDK Supervisor.
The primary objective was to enhance stability and reliability, which the workforce completed by fixing points that had been inflicting backend and UI crashes, updating the UI framework, updating the hypervisor framework, updating graphics libraries, and eliminating technical debt. Particularly, they moved to a more recent model of Qt, its platform for constructing the consumer interfaces within the Emulator; updating its graphics rendering system gfxstream; and including over 600 end-to-end checks to the pytests suite. The results of all of those modifications was 30% fewer crashes, as reported by Android builders.
“Together with further end-to-end testing, this implies a extra steady, dependable, and better high quality expertise with fewer interruptions whereas utilizing the Android Emulator to check your apps,” Neville Sicard-Gregory, senior product supervisor for Android Studio, wrote in a weblog publish.
One other objective of Venture Quartz was bettering launch high quality, which concerned growing the quantity and frequency of end-to-end, automated, and integration checks by 120%. Assessments cowl eventualities corresponding to completely different snapshot configurations, graphic playing cards, networking and Bluetooth performance, and efficiency benchmarks between Emulator system picture variations.
“This complete testing ensures these essential elements operate appropriately and interprets to a extra dependable testing atmosphere for builders. Because of this, Android app builders can precisely assess their app’s habits in a wider vary of eventualities,” Sicard-Gregory wrote.
The ultimate objective was to scale back the quantity of open bugs within the Emulator, and through this initiative, the Android workforce was in a position to scale back open points by 43.5%, going from 4,605 to 2,605. In line with the workforce, 17% of the problems had been fastened throughout Venture Quartz, whereas the rest had been closed as a consequence of being out of date, beforehand fastened, or duplicates of different points.
“Whereas these enhancements are thrilling, it’s not the tip. We’ll proceed to construct on the standard enhancements from Venture Quartz to additional improve the Android Emulator expertise for Android app builders,” Sicard-Gregory concluded.