A very quick and effective trick to boost Android Studio
Originally posted on my Medium profile.
As an android developer, we get to spend a huge chunk of our time on Android Studio, the Google’s official compiler for developing native Android apps. Over the years, it has evolved into a very powerful IDE with lots of features and functionalities. But there are still some problems, which hasn’t been fixed yet for a lots of developers due to various reasons such as Gradle build time, Android Studio speed etc.
There have been many articles including official documentation on how to speed up. Some works and some not. But this article is not about gradle build time. Rather this is about more common but frustrating problem: slow Android Studio. Let’s see how to speed it and make it faster in some very easy ways.
⚙️ Android Studio Requirements
According to Android Studio’s official system requirements, it takes at minimum 3 GB RAM to run smoothly. Honestly, its a lot and I believe that is the biggest cause of being it too slow all the time.
The android developers are always complaining about the speed of Android Studio and how its slow ALL THE TIME. This makes overall development slow and frustrating. It affects productivity negatively.
So enough chit chat. Let’s see how to make it a lot faster in a very easy way.
🚀Speeding Up Android Studio
You might have read different tricks such as Offline Gradle, increasing memory in gradle.properties file, disabling Instant Run and so on. Let me show you a very easy way, shared by none other than Jake Wharton on Reddit about a year .
So, let me show you how to do this.
First, click on File -> Settings -> Plugins to open dialog like this.
Now, disable or Check Off all the plugins which not usable for you. I have disabled following:
- Android APK Support
- Android Games
- Android NDK
- App Links Assistant
- Copyright
- Coverage
- CVS Integeration
- Editor Config
- Fabric for Android Studio
- Firebase (App Indexing, Services, Testing)
- Github
- Google (Cloud Tools Core, Cloud Tools for Android, Developer Samples, Login, Services)
- Markdown Support
- Mercurial integration
- hg4idea
- Settings repository
- Subversion integration
- Task management
- Test recorder
- TestNG-J
- YAML
Now, you dialog will be something like this:
Now, click Apply -> OK and restart Android Studio. You’ll feel the difference instantly I bet.
🤔 What If I Need Any Plugin Later?
For example, at some point your app needs Firebase App Links and you want to use the plugin. Then just enable it for a temporary time. Do your work. And then you can disable it again.
I hope this will fix your problem and make your Android Studio faster and your app development faster. 😃 Happy App Coding
If you liked this article, you can read my new article about my year in review of 2018 below:
Reflections on 2018 — My Year In Review
Wajahat Karim is a graduate from NUST, Islamabad, an experienced mobile developer, an active open source contributor, and co-author of two books Learning Android Intents and Mastering Android Game Development with Unity. In his spare time, he likes to spend time with his family, do experiments on coding, loves to write about lots of things (mostly on blog and medium) and is passionate contributor to open source. In June 2018, one of his library became #1 on Github Trending. His libraries have about 2000 stars on Github and are being used in various apps by the developers all around the globe. Follow him on Twitter and Medium to get more updates about his work in Writing, Android and Open Source.
Wajahat Karim (@WajahatKarim) | Twitter
Also, if you have any questions you’d like him to answer, contact him through his website at wajahatkarim.com with DEAR WAJAHAT in the subject line.
Top comments (1)
Great article. Really helped me overcome annoying difficulty.