The Android growth staff took a break from including main options to the Android Emulator during the last six months to deal with an initiative known as Mission Quartz, the objective of which was to enhance the steadiness, velocity, and efficiency of the platform.
Now, the staff 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 staff completed 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 objective of Mission Quartz was bettering launch high quality, which concerned growing the quantity and frequency of end-to-end, automated, and integration assessments by 120%. Checks cowl eventualities reminiscent of 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 accurately and interprets to a extra dependable testing surroundings 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 cut back the quantity of open bugs within the Emulator, and through this initiative, the Android staff was capable of scale back open points by 43.5%, going from 4,605 to 2,605. In accordance with the staff, 17% of the problems have been mounted throughout Mission Quartz, whereas the rest have been closed because of being out of date, beforehand mounted, or duplicates of different points.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 Mission Quartz to additional improve the Android Emulator expertise for Android app builders,” Sicard-Gregory concluded.