The Android growth group took a break from including main options to the Android Emulator over the past six months to concentrate on an initiative referred to as Venture Quartz, the objective of which was to enhance the steadiness, velocity, and efficiency of the platform.
Now, the group is reporting the enhancements it was capable of 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 group 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 moderen 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 assessments 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 secure, 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 rising the quantity and frequency of end-to-end, automated, and integration assessments by 120%. Assessments cowl situations resembling totally different snapshot configurations, graphic playing cards, networking and Bluetooth performance, and efficiency benchmarks between Emulator system picture variations.
“This complete testing ensures these important parts perform accurately and interprets to a extra dependable testing atmosphere for builders. In consequence, Android app builders can precisely assess their app’s habits in a wider vary of situations,” Sicard-Gregory wrote.
The ultimate objective was to scale back the quantity of open bugs within the Emulator, and through this initiative, the Android group was capable of cut back open points by 43.5%, going from 4,605 to 2,605. In keeping with the group, 17% of the problems had been fastened throughout Venture Quartz, whereas the rest had been closed as a result of being out of date, beforehand fastened, or duplicates of different points.
“Whereas these enhancements are thrilling, it’s not the tip. We are going to proceed to construct on the standard enhancements from Venture Quartz to additional improve the Android Emulator expertise for Android app builders,” Sicard-Gregory concluded.
