In October last year, Google rolled out Android Studio 4.1 with support for foldables in the Android Emulator, a few style updates, TensorFlow Lite enhancements, and more. Over the last few months, the company has been working on the next major Android Studio update, and it's now finally available on the stable channel.

Android Studio 4.2 is a major release that brings several new features and improvements. As per the Android Studio release notes, the update includes Android Gradle plugin 4.2.0, an offline mode for the Database Inspector, Safe Args support, an IntelliJ platform update, a visual refresh for the New Project wizard, and much more. In this post, we'll highlight some of the major changes introduced in the update.

IntelliJ Platform Update

Android Studio 4.2 comes with all the major features and updates found in IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition 2020.2, including an updated GitHub UI for pull requests, a new centralized problems window, and more. The release also brings a new Inspections Widget that displays the number of warnings and errors in the current file and lets developers easily navigate between them, a new Problems tool window, a new Shared Indexes plugin to cut indexing time on large projects by around 60-75%, etc. Check out the IntelliJ IDEA 2020.2 release post for more details.

Project Wizard & Module Wizard Updates

The update also includes a visual refresh for the New Project wizard and the Module Wizard. The updated UI will help developers easily discover Android device types and understand the variety of module types they can add to their app. Google has also added a ViewBinding to each of the templates.

Database Inspector Improvements

Database Inspector improvements in Android Studio 4.2

Android Studio 4.2 brings several enhancements for the Database Inspector. It now has a new offline mode that will let developers inspect their app's database after a process disconnects, making it easier to diagnose issues after a crash. The update also brings a handy query history option that will help developers view all previous queries.

Along with the changes mentioned above, Android Studio 4.2 also brings improvements for features like System Trace, Safe Args support, multiple device deployment, and more. You can watch the video embedded below for more details on these changes.