The Android improvement crew took a break from including main options to the Android Emulator over the past six months to give attention to an initiative referred to as Venture Quartz, the aim of which was to enhance the steadiness, pace, and efficiency of the platform.
Now, the crew is reporting the enhancements it was in a position to make to the Android Emulator, which may now be skilled both by downloading the most recent model of Android Studio or updating to the most recent model of the Emulator within the SDK Supervisor.
The primary aim was to enhance stability and reliability, which the crew achieved by fixing points that have 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 person 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 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 aim 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%. Exams 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 crucial elements perform appropriately and interprets to a extra dependable testing atmosphere for builders. Consequently, Android app builders can precisely assess their app’s conduct in a wider vary of eventualities,” Sicard-Gregory wrote.
The ultimate aim was to cut back the quantity of open bugs within the Emulator, and through this initiative, the Android crew was in a position to cut back open points by 43.5%, going from 4,605 to 2,605. In line with the crew, 17% of the problems have been mounted throughout Venture Quartz, whereas the rest have been closed attributable to being out of date, beforehand mounted, or duplicates of different points.
“Whereas these enhancements are thrilling, it’s not the top. 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.