Android Developers Blog: Android Studio

Accurately Measure Android App Performance with Profileable Builds

03 November 2022

Posted by Yi Yang (Software Engineer)It’s important to stay on top of your app performance to make sure your users can easily use your app. When an app experiences issues such as animation jank, frozen frames, and high memory usage, it negatively impacts the user experience which could lead to lower ratings or app deletion. To fix these performance issues, we first need the right tools to measure app performance correctly.

CPU cyclesmemory

Historically, profiling an Android app required a debug build.

Screenshot of the debug/release build variants in Android Studio

The debug build allows you to use features useful for development, like Apply Changes, working with the debugger, or the Database Inspector. In addition, it also enables profiling tools to inspect the state of a running app unavailable to the release build. Under the hood, the debug build sets the debuggable flag in the Android Manifest to true.

AndroidManifest.xml

...

</application>

While useful, the debug build is meant to provide more information at the cost of performance. That’s because when debuggable is true, a lot of compiler optimizations are turned off.

To show you the performance difference between the debug and release builds, we recorded an app running on the same device but in these two build variants. To visualize the frame rendering time, we turned on Profile GPU Rendering (or Profile HWUI rendering in some Android versions) in Developer Options when recording the screen. Each vertical bar on the bottom of the screen represents how long each frame takes to render. The shorter these bars are, the smoother the animation is.

The screen recording below shows the same app running on the same device. The left-hand side is on a debug build, the right-hand side a release build. The debug version has more stuttering frames, also known as UI jank. This means when you profile the debug build, you may see timing measurements significantly different from what your users see in the release build, and you may end up optimizing something that is not the problem.

GIF showing the performance difference between debug and release builds

To address that issue, the Android platform introduced a tag called profileable. It enables many profiling tools that measure timing information, without the performance overhead of the debug build. Profileable is available on devices running Android 10 or higher.

AndroidManifest.xml

Let’s look at another screen recording. This time, the left side shows a profileable release app and the right side an unmodified release app. There’s little performance difference between the two.

GIF showing the performance difference between profileable and release builds

With profileable, you can now measure the timing information much more accurately than the debug build.

This feature is designed to be used in production where app security is paramount. Therefore we decided to only support profiling features such as Callstack Sampling and System Trace, where timing measurement is critical. The Memory Profiler only supports Native Memory Profiling. The Energy Profiler and Event Timeline are not available. The complete list of disabled features can be found here. All these restrictions are put in place to keep your app's data safe.

Now that you know what the profileable tag does, let me show you how to use it. There are two options: automatically and manually.

Option 1: Use the option in Android Studio.

With Android Studio Flamingo and Android Gradle Plugin 8.0, all you need to do is just select this option from the Profile dropdown menu in the Run toolbar: “Profile with low overhead”. Then Android Studio will automatically build a profileable app of your current build type and attach the profiler. It works for any build type, but we highly recommend you to profile a release build, which is what your users see.

Screenshot of the one-click profileable builds feature in Android Studio Flamingo Canary

When a profileable app is being profiled, there is a visual indicator along with a banner message. Only the CPU and Memory profilers are available.

Screenshot of Android Studio profiler profiling a profileable build

In the Memory Profiler, only the native allocation recording feature is available due to security reasons.

Screenshot showing Android Studio memory profiler features when profiling a profileable build

This feature is great for simplifying the process of local profiling but it only applies when you profile with Android Studio. Therefore, it can still be beneficial to manually configure your app in case you want to diagnose performance issues in production or if you’re not ready to use the latest version of Android Studio or Android Gradle plugin yet.

Option 2: Manual configuration.

It takes 4 steps to manually enable profileable.

1. Add this line to your AndroidManifest.xml.

AndroidManifest.xml

2. Switch to the release build type (or any build type that’s not debuggable).

Screenshot of selecting the active build variant in Android Studio

3. Make sure you have a signing key configured. To prevent compromising your release signing key, you can temporarily use your debug signing key, or configure a new key just for profiling.

4. Build and run the app on a device running Android 10 or higher. You now have a profileable app. You can then attach the Android Studio profiler by launching the Profiler tool window and selecting the app process from the dropdown list.

Screenshot of process selection in Android Studio profilers

Many of you may wonder if it is safe to leave the profileable manifest tag in production and the answer is yes. This tag is designed to be usable in release builds to enable local profiling. No memory data is readable by the host profiling tools and the shell process. Only stack traces are readable, which are typically obfuscated or lacking symbols in release builds.

In fact, many first-party Google apps such as Google Maps ship their app to the Play Store as profileable apps.

Screenshot showing Google Maps as a profileable process in the profiler process dropdown

In summary, profiling the debug build may skew the performance and therefore it’s better to analyze the release build with the profileable tag enabled.

Here’s a table that shows which build type should be used:

Release	Profileable Release	Debug
Production	Profiling CPU timing	Debugger, Inspectors, etc. Profiling memory, energy, etc.

To learn more about profilable builds, start by reading the documentation and the the user guide.

With these tools provided by the Android team, we hope you can make your app run faster and smoother.

What’s new in Jetpack Compose

24 October 2022

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer

We launched Jetpack Compose over a year ago, and have been busy improving it ever since. We’ve added new features and invented powerful tools to make your experience developing Android UI as productive, intuitive and fun as possible. So, if you're starting a new app, it's time to write it with Compose! With Material Design 3 support, new Bill Of Materials, Compose for Wear OS Stable and Android TV (alpha), Compose Camp, and many other pieces of news… It's an exciting release! Compose in the Community In the last year, we’ve seen many companies developing with Compose at scale, implementing new features and migrating screens from views to Compose. For example, we talked to the engineers at Lyft, who told us that over 90% of their new feature code is written in Compose, and moving to Compose made their code much simpler and easier to maintain. They also shared “We rewrote the button component in our app using Compose. Before it required 800 lines of code across three files plus 17 different XML files, and it is now down to a single Kotlin file with 300 lines of code. This is a 60% reduction in the Kotlin code alone“. The team at Zepeto has also been implementing Compose across many features, and are enjoying the experience, as “Compose simplified our UI layer logic, making it easier to understand code written by my colleagues.”It’s great to see how these teams experience faster development cycles, and also feel their UI code is more concise and readable. And they’re not the only ones. Since this year’s Google I/O, the number of top 1000 apps on Google Play using Compose has increased by 50%! To help your team follow in the footsteps of the teams at Lyft, Zepeto, and others, we published a guide on How to Adopt Compose for your Team. It outlines how and where to start, and shows the areas of development where Compose can bring huge added value.
Compose, October ‘22 release Today we’re releasing a new stable version of Compose, with some exciting features and news. First of all, we’ve heard from you how it can be daunting to track versions across different artifacts that might go on different release schedules, so we’re now publishing, together with every Stable release of any of the Compose artifacts, a Bill of Materials, or BOM, to make your life easier. Our first BOM release, Compose October ‘22, brings support for Staggered Grids, drawing Text directly to Canvas, Pull to Refresh, as well as performance improvements and bug fixes.
Compose Bill of Materials A BOM is a Maven module that declares a set of libraries with their versions. It will greatly simplify the way you define Compose library versions in your Gradle dependencies block, especially now that we moved the various Jetpack Compose libraries to independent versioning schemes. Instead of defining each version separately, which can become cumbersome and prone to errors when library versions start to differ, you now only need to define one BOM version and all Compose library versions will be extracted from that. We will publish a new version of the BOM every time a Compose artifact has a new stable release, so moving from stable release to stable release is going to be much simpler.

dependencies {
// Import the Compose BOM
implementation platform('androidx.compose:compose-bom:2022.10.00')

// Declare dependencies for the desired Compose libraries without versions
implementation 'androidx.compose.foundation:foundation'
androidTestImplementation 'androidx.compose.ui:ui-test-junit4'

...
}

Quick start guide

Modifiers on overdrive

Behind the scenes, we’re always working on improving Compose performance. The October ‘22 release includes a major refactor of how Modifiers work under the hood. While you will not notice anything changing in the APIs, this refactor paves the way for greatly improving Modifier performance. Learn more about the rationale behind the changes, and what’s planned for the near future in the ADS talk Compose Modifiers deep dive.

Popup & Dialog elevation change

Accessibility is always a first-class citizen for Compose, and this release contains a behavior change that helps fix an Accessibility bug with Popups and Dialogs: their maximum elevation is decreased from 30dp to 8dp. Your app will be impacted only if it uses a custom dialog or popup implementation with an elevation higher than 8dp. The release notes contain more information about the change, including a way to override the new behavior as an interim solution (keep in mind that we always recommend using 8dp maximum when customizing popups or dialogs).

New features

We added a lot of new functionality to Compose. Here are some highlights:

Implement staggered grids using the new LazyHorizontalStaggeredGrid and LazyVerticalStaggeredGrid
Draw text directly to Canvas using DrawScope.drawText
You can add a variable font to your app and change its properties using the FontVariation object.
Add a UrlAnnotation to your annotated string to improve Accessibility services interacting with the text.
Add hyphenation to your text using the new LineBreak API.
Swipe to refresh with the new pullRefresh modifier.
Add snapping behavior to your lazy lists using SnapFlingBehavior.
LookAheadLayout is a new type of layout that provides information about final measurement and placement of its children so you can decide on intermediate layouts.

Compose Material 3 stable

Today we also announce the first stable release of the Compose Material 3 library! You can build an app using Compose and theme it according to Material Design 3, our latest iteration of Material Design. Use Material Design 3 to further customize your app’s colors, typography and shapes to make your brand stand out! The library contains fresh and updated versions of many UI components, such as buttons, cards, checkboxes, switches, navigation bars, drawers, and many more, with support for others on its way. See a list of all the supported components in the documentation and learn more in this blog post.

To help you adopt Material 3 check out our new migration guide with clear guidance on how Material 2 concepts translate to Material 3. The default template in Android Studio Flamingo now uses Material 3, to get you up and running in no time. We’ve also updated many of our sample apps, tutorials, templates, and codelabs to use Material 3 so you can learn as you go!

New tools

Developing your app using Jetpack Compose is much easier with the new and improved tools around it. We’ve added tons of new features to Android Studio to improve your workflow and efficiency:

Android Studio Dolphin is the latest stable release, bringing you:

Animation Coordination
Multipreview annotations
Recomposition counts in Layout Inspector

Android Studio Electric Eel contains beta features, like:

Live Edit (experimental)
Composition rendering highlighting
Configuring Preview devices
Live updates in Previews

Android Studio Flamingo contains canary features such as:

New project templates use Compose and Material 3 by default
Live Edit turned on by default
Improved composition tracing to help you better inspect performance issues.

Relay

Today we also launch the first alpha version of Relay, a design-to-code solution for improving designer-developer collaboration. Designers create UI components using the Figma plugin, and developers use the Android Studio plugin to automatically use these components in their apps. The generated components are composable functions and can be integrated directly into your Compose app. Learn more about Relay in the documentation.

Compose on Wear OS and Large Screens

In July we released the first Stable version of Compose for Wear OS, ready to build production apps. Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building UIs for Wear OS apps. We’ve included over twenty Compose UI components that were designed specifically for Wearables, like TimeText, PositionIndicator, and ScalingLazyColumn.

We’re also continuing to make it easier to design, develop, and test apps for large screens such as foldables, tablets, and Chrome OS. The material3-window-size-class library graduated to Stable, giving you a set of opinionated viewport breakpoints to work with. Large screen designs often contain staggered grids, and the addition of LazyHorizontalStaggeredGrid and LazyVerticalStaggeredGrid will help implement these.

The new Google Pixel Watch is here - start building for Wear OS!

07 October 2022

Posted by the Android Developers Team

If you caught yesterday's Made by Google event, then you saw the latest devices in the Pixel portfolio. Besides the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones, we wanted to showcase two of the latest form factors: the Google Pixel Tablet¹ (Google's brand new tablet, coming in 2023), and the latest device powered with Wear OS by Google: the Google Pixel Watch! As consumers begin to preorder the watch, it's an especially great time to prepare your app so it looks great on all of the new watches that consumers will get their hands on over the holidays. Discover the latest updates to Wear OS, how apps like yours are upgrading their experiences, and how you can get started building a beautiful, efficient Wear OS app. Here’s What’s New in Wear OS The Google Pixel Watch is built on Wear OS and includes the latest updates to the platform, Wear OS 3.5. This version of Wear OS is also available on some of your other favorite Wear OS devices! The new Wear OS experience is designed to feel fluid and easy to navigate, bringing users the information they need with a tap, swipe, or voice command. With a refreshed UI and rich notifications, your users can see even more at a glance.

To take advantage of building on top of all of these new features, earlier this year we released Compose for Wear OS, our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to help you get your app running with fewer development hours - and fewer lines of code. It's built from the bottom up with Kotlin, and it moved to 1.0 earlier this year, meaning the API is stable and ready for you to get building. Here's what's in the 1.0 release:

Material: The Compose Material catalog for Wear OS already offers more components than are available with View-based layouts. The components follow material styling and also implement material theming, which allows you to customize the design for your brand.

Declarative: Compose for Wear OS leverages Modern Android Development and works seamlessly with other Jetpack libraries. Compose-based UIs in most cases result in less code and accelerate the development process as a whole.

Interoperable: If you have an existing Wear OS app with a large View-based codebase, it's possible to gradually adopt Compose for Wear OS by using the Compose Interoperability APIs rather than having to rewrite the whole codebase.

Handles different watch shapes: Compose for Wear OS extends the foundation of Compose, adding a DSL for all curved elements to make it easy to develop for all Wear OS device shapes: round, square, or rectangular with minimal code.

Performance: Each Compose for Wear OS library ships with its own baseline profiles that are automatically merged and distributed with your app’s APK and are compiled ahead of time on device. In most cases, this achieves app performance for production builds that is on-par with View-based apps. However, it’s important to know how to configure, develop, and test your app’s performance for the best results.

Another exciting update for Wear OS is the launch of the Tiles Material library to help you build tiles more quickly. The Tiles Material Library includes pre-built Material components and layouts that embrace the latest Material Design for Wear OS. This easy to use library includes components for buttons, progress arcs and more - saving you the time of building them from scratch. Plus, with the pre-built layouts, you can kickstart your tiles development knowing your layout follows Material design guidelines on how your tiles should be formatted. Finally, in the recently released Android Studio Dolphin, we added a range of Wear OS features to help get your apps, tiles, and watch faces ready for all of the Wear OS 3 devices. With an updated Wear OS Emulator Toolbar, an intuitive Pairing Assistant, and the new Direct Surface Launch feature to quickly test watch faces, tiles, and complication, it's now simpler and more efficient than ever to make great apps for WearOS. Get Inspired with New App Experiences Apps like yours are already providing fantastic experiences for Wear OS, from Google apps to others like Spotify, Strava, Bitmoji, adidas Running, MyFitnessPal, and Calm. This year, Todoist, PeriodTracker, and Outdooractive all rebuilt their app with Compose - taking advantage of the tools and APIs that make building their app simpler and more efficient; in fact, Outdooractive found that using Compose for Wear OS cut development time by 30% for their team.

With the launch of the Google Pixel Watch, we are seeing fantastic new experiences from Google apps - using the new hardware features as another way to provide an exceptional user experience. Google Photos now allows you to set your favorite picture as your watch face on the Google Pixel Watch, which has 19 customizable watch faces, each with many personalization options. With Google Assistant built in, Google Pixel Watch users can interact with their favorite apps by using the Wear OS app or leveraging the built-in integration with Google Assistant. For example, Google Home’s latest updates users can easily control their smart home devices through the Wear OS app or by saying “Hey Google” to their watch to do everything from adjusting the thermostat to getting notifications from their Nest doorbell when a person or package at the door². Health and fitness apps have a lot of opportunity with the latest Wear OS platform and hardware updates. Google Pixel Watch includes Fitbit’s amazing health and fitness features, including accurate heart rate tracking with on-device machine learning and deep optimization down to the processor level. Users can get insights into key metrics like breathing rate, heart rate variability, sleep quality and more right on their Google Pixel Watch. With this improved data, there are more opportunities for health and fitness apps to provide meaningful insights and experiences for their users. The updates and improvements from Wear OS and the Google Pixel Watch make building differentiated app experiences more tangible. Apps are using those capabilities to excite and delight users and so can you. Get started The Google Pixel Watch is the latest addition to an already incredible Wear OS device ecosystem. From improved APIs and tools to exciting new hardware, there is no time like the present to get started on your Wear OS app. To begin developing with Compose for Wear OS, get started on our curated learning pathway for a step-by-step learning journey. Then, check out the documentation including a quick start guide and get hands on experience with the Compose for Wear OS codelab! Discover even more with the Wear OS session from Google I/O and hear the absolute latest and greatest from Wear OS by tuning into the keynote and technical sessions at the upcoming Android Developer Summit! Want to learn more about all the MBG announcements? Check out the official blog here. Plus, get started with another exciting form factor coming to the Pixel ecosystem, the Google Pixel Tablet, by optimizing your app for tablets! Disclaimers: 1. The Google Pixel Tablet has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission or other regulators. This device may not be sold or otherwise distributed until required legal authorizations have been obtained. 2. Requires compatible smart home devices (sold separately).

Compose for Wear OS is now 1.0: time to build wearable apps with Compose!

27 July 2022

Posted by Kseniia Shumelchyk, Android Developer Relations Engineer

Today we’re launching version 1.0 of Compose for Wear OS, the first stable release of our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to help developers create beautiful, responsive apps for Google’s smartwatch platform. Compose for Wear OS was built from the bottom up in Kotlin with assumptions of modern app architecture. It makes building apps for Wear OS easier, faster, and more intuitive by following the declarative approach and offering powerful Kotlin syntax. The toolkit not only simplifies UI development, but also provides a rich set of UI components optimized for the watch experience with built-in support of Material design for Wear OS, and it’s accompanied by many powerful tools in Android Studio to streamline UI iteration. What this means The Compose for Wear OS 1.0 release means that the API is stable and has what you need to build production-ready apps. Moving forward, Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building user interfaces for Wear OS apps. Your feedback has helped shape the development of Compose for Wear OS; our developer community has been with us each step of the way, engaging with us on Slack and providing feedback on the APIs, components, and tooling. As we are working on bringing new features to future versions of Compose for Wear OS, we will continue to welcome developer feedback and suggestions. We are also excited to share how developers have already adopted Compose in their Wear OS apps and what they like about it. What developers are saying Todoist helps people organize, plan and collaborate on projects. They are one of the first companies to completely rebuild their Wear OS app using Compose and redesign all screens and interactions: “When the new Wear design language and Compose for Wear OS were announced, we were thrilled. It gave us new motivation and opportunity to invest into the platform.”

Todoist application

“Compose for Wear OS helped us tremendously both on the development side and the design side. The guides and documentation made it easy for our product designers to prepare mockups matching the new design language of the platform. And the libraries made it very easy for us to implement these, providing all the necessary widgets and customizations. Swipe to dismiss, TimeText, ScalingLazyList were all components that worked very well out-of-the-box for us, while still allowing us to make a recognizable and distinct app.”

Outdooractive helps people plan routes for hiking, cycling, running, and other outdoor adventures. As wearables are a key aspect of their product strategy, they have been quick to update their offering with an app for the user's wrist.

Outdooractive application

Outdooractive has already embraced Wear OS 3, and by migrating to Compose for Wear OS they aimed for developer-side benefits such as having a modern code base and increased development productivity: “Huge improvement is how lists are created. Thanks to ScalingLazyColumn it is easier (compared to RecyclerView) to create scrolling screens without wasting resources. Availability of standard components like Chip helps saving time by being able to use pre-fabricated design-/view-components. What would have taken us days now takes us hours.” The Outdooractive team also highlighted that Compose for Wear OS usage help them to strive for better app quality: “Improved animations were a nice surprise, allowing smoothly hiding/revealing components by just wrapping components in “AnimatedVisibility” for example, which we used in places where we would normally not have invested any time in implementing animations.”
Another developer we’ve been working with, Period Tracker helps keep track of period cycles, ovulation, and the chance of conception.

Period Tracker application

They have taken advantage of our UI toolkit to significantly improve user interface and quickly develop new features available exclusively on Wear OS:

“Compose for Wear OS provided us with many kits to help us bring our designs to life. For example, we used Chips to design the main buttons for period recording, water drinking, and taking medication, and it also helped us create a unique look for the latest version of Kegel workout.”

Similarly to other developers, Period Tracker noted that Compose for Wear OS helped them to achieve better developer experience and improved collaboration with design and development teams:

“For example, before Chips components were available, we had to use a custom way to load images on buttons which caused a lot of adaptation work. Yes, Compose for Wear OS improved our productivity and made our designers more willing to design a better user experience on wearables.”

Check out the in-depth case studies to learn more about how other developers are using Jetpack Compose.

1.0 release

Let’s look into the key features available with 1.0 release:

Note that using version 1.0 of Compose for Wear OS requires using the version 1.2 of androidx.compose libraries and therefore Kotlin 1.7.0. Read more about Jetpack Compose 1.2 release here.

Tools and libraries

Android Studio

The declarative paradigm shift also alters the development workflow. The Compose tooling available in Android Studio will help you build apps more productively.

Android Studio Dolphin includes a new project template with Compose for Wear OS to help you get started.

The Composable Preview annotation allows you to instantly verify how your app’s layout behaves on different watch shapes and sizes. You can configure the device preview to show different Wear OS device types (round, rectangle, etc):

import androidx.compose.ui.tooling.preview

@Preview(

device = Devices.WEAR_OS_LARGE_ROUND,

showSystemUi = true,

backgroundColor = 0xff000000,

showBackground = true

)

@Composable

fun PreviewCustomComposable() {

CustomComposable(...)

}

Starting with Android Studio Electric Eel, Live Edit supports iterative code development for Wear OS, providing quick feedback as you make changes in the editor and immediately reflecting UI in the Preview or running app on the device.

Horologist

Horologist is a group of open-source libraries from Google that supplement Wear OS development, which we announced with the beta release of Compose for Wear OS. Horologist has graduated a number of experimental APIs to stable including TimeText fadeAway modifiers, WearNavScaffold, the Date and Time pickers.

Date and Time pickers from Horologist library

Learning Compose

If you are unfamiliar with using Jetpack Compose, we recommend starting with the tutorial. Many of the development principles there also apply to Compose for Wear OS.