Google has released Android Studio “Iguana”, based on the 2023.2 IntelliJ platform, with crash reports linked to specific versions of an application alongside new policy warnings ahead of Google Play Store submission.

Android Studio is based on IntelliJ Community Edition, and in this version the underlying IntelliJ IDE is updated to 2023.2. This means it has GitLab integration, improved text search, user interface improvements, and more. It does not include a big feature of 2023.2, the JetBrains AI Assistant, which is reserved for commercial editions of the IDE.

Google may not be unhappy about this, since it has its own Studio Bot coding assistant, but this is not available in our install of Iguana and currently requires the next version, codenamed Jellyfish and already in preview. This version will expand availability of Google’s Studio Bot coding assistant to countries outside the US, as well including a template for applications using Gemini AI. Studio Bot was introduced in May 2023 so Google is taking its time with the rollout – though enthusiasts in 180 countries (including the USA but not the UK) can try the preview now.

GitHub Copilot is also available for Android Studio, but despite more than 7 million installs (across this and other JetBrains IDEs) the reviews are full of complaints about bugs and poor performance, in contrast to the extensions available for Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio. “It seems like the development on the plugin is slow. I feel like the developers are purposefully holding back on features or releases to make the copilot plugin for VSCode look better,” said one.

AI aside, new features in Iguana include integration between the App Quality Insights tools, which pulls data on app crashes from the Firebase Crashlytics service, and git version control, so that the stack trace is linked to the code for the actual version that crashed.

Developers using Iguana will be proactively informed if an SDK included in project dependencies is a “potential Google Play policy violation,” according to the release announcement. This is based on the Google Play SDK index, which shows SDKs that are registered with Google and identifies those with defects or compliance issues. The idea is that it is better to discover issues in the IDE, rather than have a submission to the Play Store rejected. 

There is now a heavy emphasis on Jetpack Compose in Android Studio, this being a toolkit for UI building. A new feature in this release is the Compose UI Check which automatically audits a Compose user interface for responsive and accessibility issues.

Progressive rendering in Compose Preview reduces render quality for screens that are out of view, to save memory.

Live Edit, a feature which remains experimental, lets you update a JetPack Compose user interface and see the changes immediately applied in the emulator or physical device; potentially a big time saver. This only works for the user interface and not for non-visual code or application logic.