One the most requested features we receive is to make app builds and deployment faster in Android Studio. Today at the Android Developer Summit, we’re announcing a preview of Android Studio 2.0 featuring Instant Run that will dramatically improve your development workflow. With Android Studio 2.0, we are also including a preview of a new GPU Profiler.
Instant Run allows you to change the code of your program as it’s running on your device or emulator, and if it indeed works as advertised, this should be a major boon for developers. TechCrunch claims Google’s also improved the emulator in this release, and if there’s one thing I know about programming for Android, it’s that the emulator was absolutely terrible, so good to know they’re working on it.
Quite ironic that the app runs on Mac (as per screenshots), but quite a powerful development environment none the less.
Why is that ironic? The big war between Apple, Microsoft and Google is mostly in customers’ minds and helps their marketing, they don’t care as much themselves.
There used to be a “cannot live with them, cannot live without them” relationship between Apple and Microsoft. Apple made hardware that ran some of Microsofts software. Microsoft stayed out of the hardware business. Of course they were competitors because Microsoft was PC and Apple was “better-than-PC”.
Then came Google, but all they did was “some services on the web”
And then, roughly 10 years ago, mobile became big. Innovation in PC-Applications came to a halt and hardware only became better but not “more”. Everyone tried to conquer the mobile market from their own specialism and tried to control the entire stack.
Google bought Android and started to make hardware (through partners).
Apple got their new OS in order and created a mobile stepchild with services like iTunes and AppStore.
Microsoft made sure all their corporate software would run on consumer devices that could render their documents while also spinning up more and more cloudservices and even hardware.
And there are other players, like Amazon and FaceBook that tried to enter the “we do it all” mobile market. You can clearly see the background of all these companies in their current portfolio. There isn’t one clear winner yet but there are several “not very compatible” ecosystems that provide a pretty hefty lock-in. Extremely roughly you can divide them along these lines:
* Apple, the top 15% for the top 15%. Quality over Quantity. Fashion and coolness
* Google, the top 85% of the now. Something for everyone, choice and everything online
* Microsoft, the top 85% of the past and businessworld. Compatibility and getting all the work done
And then there is Amazon that sneaks its way into all the physical things we want to buy, the digital services we use and the servers that so many things run on.
And FaceBook, where we spend all our time with friends and strangers exchanging food and sillyness and live changing events that keep our mobile devices popping up all those notifications
All of these companies would love for everything to be theirs. They are basically too big to fail and without them there would hardly be anything left technologywise. The only danger is not the innovative startup that will conquer them all because those can be bought for a couple of billion (I am looking at you Twitter, and you are just playing hard to get Snapchat). The only danger are the other big guys, or their Chinese equivalents. Mutual destruction in the corporate world.
(but seeing Android on OSX or Office on iOS or Cortana on Android or Youtube on Windows …. is still a fun picture)
Exactly. Bunch of idiots thinks that these companies are run by gnomes from the fantasyland. People who work there are just normal people you meet on the street, like everyone else. They don’t give a damn about these company “wars” and use any product they want to.
That app runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It is based on Intellij Idea, which runs on exactly the same OSes.
These three systems are what Google supported in all their SDKs, so no change there.
Hope that this speed improvements also works for tests. The speed of the current red-green-refactor is far too slow to be workable. Sure we can use Roboelectric but that usually doesn’t work for the latest Android version, so a Google supported solution would be most welcome.