The Android improvement crew took a break from including main options to the Android Emulator over the past six months to concentrate on an initiative referred to as Challenge Quartz, the objective of which was to enhance the soundness, velocity, and efficiency of the platform.
Now, the crew is reporting the enhancements it was in a position to make to the Android Emulator, which might 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 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 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 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 put up.
One other objective of Challenge Quartz was bettering launch high quality, which concerned rising the quantity and frequency of end-to-end, automated, and integration checks by 120%. Assessments cowl situations resembling 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 parts perform appropriately and interprets to a extra dependable testing setting 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 cut back the quantity of open bugs within the Emulator, and through this initiative, the Android crew was in a position to scale back open points by 43.5%, going from 4,605 to 2,605. In response to the crew, 17% of the problems have been fastened throughout Challenge Quartz, whereas the rest have been closed resulting from being out of date, beforehand fastened, or duplicates of different points.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 Challenge Quartz to additional improve the Android Emulator expertise for Android app builders,” Sicard-Gregory concluded.