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Android Studio 2.0 Beta 5 Available

posted Feb 18, 2016, 6:53 PM by Tor Norbye
We've just promoted beta 5 from the canary to the beta channel. Relative to beta 2 (the previous build in the beta channel) we've fixed a number of critical bugs in Instant Run -- from apps not showing the most recent changes, to apps crashing, to apps getting passed weird intent data.

Note that you need to use the latest version of Gradle and Studio together, and in this build we automatically update the Gradle version if already using a previous non-stable (e.g. 2.x) preview version.

Note also that all Instant Run settings have been reset to their defaults in this build. The reason we had to do this is in beta4 is that these settings were actually per project settings, not per user. But this is not what many users expected (so they'd tweak the settings in one project and then be surprised when in another project the values were different). To fix this we've changed the settings to be per user instead. However, that moves the storage location for the settings, which is why the values are all reset.  Go to Settings > Build, Execution, Deployment > Instant Run if you want to tweak them again.

There are still a few known Instant Run bugs we're still working on which may affect some users:
  • Possible clean build performance regression. When using Instant Run with a project configured for Legacy Multidex, i.e. build.gradle is configured with minSdkVersion 20 (or lower) and multiDexEnabled true, build performance may decrease when deploying a clean build to target devices running Android 5.0 (API level 21) or higher. After the initial clean build, incremental builds will be significantly faster, and Instant Run will deploy code and resource changes as normal. Alternatively, consider creating a product flavor with minSdkVersion 21 to improve clean build performance during development.
  • Instant Run may fail when deploying to some Samsung devices when the app isn’t running on the device when you're pushing the changes (this uses adb to push the changes to the device instead of communicating directly with the app, and this can fail on some devices.)
  • Instant Run may cause apps that are using certain 3rd party libraries to crash (for example, Realm.) This happens if code in the application is placed in the same package as a library dependency and it attempts to access package private methods in that library.
  • If your app is using android:process in the manifest, Instant Run may not work correctly
We wanted to add a special note that we are very thankful for our community, and the wonderful, detailed feedback on 2.0 preview and beta releases. We work very hard to drive the IDE forward rapidly for the entire Android developer community. 2.0 contains major innovations, many driven by requests from our audience. Many of you have engaged closely with us to drive up stability on complex changes. Thank you!

Installation
You can update your current 2.0 Preview installation to 2.0 Beta 5 via the built-in patch mechanism (Check for Updates).
You can also update from 1.5 to 2.0 Beta via the patch mechanism, but you may not want to do that: See our page about how to keep multiple installations simultaneously while Studio is in preview mode.
You can also download a full zip of 2.0 Beta from the Android Studio 2.0 Beta 5 page.

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