Today was a big day for Android developers as Google released version 2.0 of Android Studio, the freely available integrated development environment (IDE) for the Android platform, almost two years after the first version of the tool was released.

The new version comes with a faster emulator and an improved GPU profiler, according to the company. The first version of Android Studio came out of beta last year. It includes essential tools to build apps, including a code editor, code analysis tools and emulators for all of Google’s Android platforms.

Faster for Building Code

The new Android Studio comes with a feature called Instant Run that lets developers see changes immediately. Google said that the new version is up to two-and-a-half times faster for building code, and up to 50 times faster when coding incremental builds. Developers are already reporting that the new version has cut build times from 40 seconds to two seconds, enabling them to save a lot of time during the compiling process, a stage when the previous version of Android Studio had a tendency to drag down processing time.

Android Studio is based on IntelliJ, an open source Java IDE. IntelliJ contains "intention action," a feature that suggests a solution when developers encounter situations where classes haven't yet been imported or methods haven't yet been written.

Versatile Emulator

Google said the emulator's new toolbar will allow developers to drag and drop Android application packages onto the emulator windows directly. The new version also offers the ability to control volume, screen rotations and screenshots.

With modern hardware, the new emulator should run faster than any physical device, Google said. Developers will also be able to emulate different network conditions and emulate the GPS, even with pre-configured paths. The emulator also includes access to all the standard Google Play services, and lets developers resize the emulator windows just by dragging the corners when testing different screen sizes.

An enhanced deep search functionality lets developers generate and test deep links directly right from the IDE. The new GPU profiler allows developers to record entire OpenGL sessions and see exactly what's happening every time the screens draw images, and it also checks for performance issues.

Over the next few weeks, Google will be showing how to take advantage of even more features in Android Studio 2.0, Android product manager Jamal Eason said on Google’s Android developer blog.

The new version, which debuted at the Android Dev Summit, is now available in preview form and can be downloaded from the canary release channel. Google streamed more than 16 hours of deep technical Android developer content from the first-ever developer summit yesterday and today. That content will be available online after the summit ends.