Android Studio v1.1 hits the stable channel

During Google I/O 2013 we were first introduced to Android Studio, though it would be two years before it would leave beta. Android Studio 1.0 arrived last December, but Google is wasting no time in pushing the platform forward now that it is out of beta. With that in mind, Android Studio 1.1 is now hitting the stable channel after two months of cooking in the background.

So what’s new here? As the change-log mentions, the theme of the update is addressing “many, many bug fixes”, but there’s also a few other minor improvements as mentioned in the full log:

• Support for version 1.1 of the Android Gradle plugin (now available as a release candidate)
• Improved support for unit testing. For more details, see this document.
• Many new lint checks. These are detailed in the Preview 1 and Preview 2 announcements.
• Android Wear watch face templates (Preview 1)
• Mipmap launcher icons and a migration quickfix (Preview 1)
• Preliminary support for BCP 47 language tags
• Many, many bug fixes

Android 1.1 is available now for all users, regardless of the channel you were coming from (beta, canary, stable, etc). To grab the update, you simply need to hit the “Check for updates” button. Of course, for those that like living on the edge, Android Studio v1.2 isn’t too far behind, though it has yet to enter the Canary channel, it has been in development now for several weeks. For what it is worth, 1.2 is also said to bring much bigger changes with it than 1.1.

For those developers out there, do you prefer using the latest stable builds, or do you like experimenting with the latest and greatest — stability be damned? For more details on v1.1, you’ll want to head over to the Android Tools Project site.