As we touched on yesterday, Google is keen to make the lives of developers a little easier and during I/O 2015 they announced some big changes coming to Android Studio. We’ve been at I/O since it all kicked off yesterday, and now that the majority of the big announcements have settled down, we can start to focus in on the bigger changes. Android Studio has been around for some time now, and Google wants all of their Android developers to use their own IDE, and it’s steadily been getting better and better. Along with Developer Pages, A/B testing for Play Store listings and more, Android Studio will make lives easier for native coders starting with version 1.3.
Available right now in the Canary channel, Android v1.3 will add native support for C/C++ via a NDK plugin so those used to using the Native Development Kit can finally make better use of Android Studio. This is based on the JetBrains Clion platform and will also feature refactoring as well as code completion for C/C++ alongside existing Java code. Developers might have heard of JetBrains, as they created the IntelliJ IDE that Google’s Android Studio was built from. Google notes that this feature has been a heavily requested one, and they’re looking for feedback with this one, so don’t be shy.
Develop, Earn and Engage was a key theme during the Developers section of the keynote, and Google have definitely announced some key new tools for them this year. It’s now easier than ever to see how well your app or game is doing in the Google Play Developer Console, and Developer Pages will give developers and publishers a central identity on the store, bringing all their titles together. Many Android developers have relied upon on the NDK for some time now, especially game developers, so to see Android Studio finally integrate better with it is great, and we should start to see some better apps and games from smaller developers as a result later this year. As we said above, it’s available right now in the Canary channel from within Android Studio.