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What Is the Difference between Canary, Beta, RC and Stable Releases in Android Studio?

Oct 31, 2017 · 4 min read

Have you ever wondered what is the difference between canary, beta, RC and stable releases in the Android Studio? Well, I have and I did some research. So let’s get started.

You have probably realized that you don’t receive all the updates, if you are using the stable channel. What do I mean by stable channel? Android Studio has a built-in preview update mechanism. Preview channels are used to send users the appropriate build of the Android Studio. For example, if you are in a stable preview channel you will only get the stable releases, but if you are in a canary channel you will get all the updates including the buggy ones. So if you want to test the new features right when they are released, you must not be on a stable channel. Here is how you can change your channel:

Open the Settings dialog (File > Settings on Windows/Linux, or Android Studio > Preferences on Mac).

In the left panel, select Appearance & Behavior > System Settings > Updates, then select a channel from the drop-down list.

If you want to have an unstable version alongside your stable Android Studio, you can download it here.

Ok, so you want to test the new features and report some bugs, but which preview channel is right for you? Here is a list of all the available channels:

1.) Canary channel

Canary channel gets all the newest releases (including stable). That means that you can test all the features as soon as they are built. Updates are usually released weekly and are mostly used to show the new latest and greatest features. You should not expect any bug-free experience.

2.) Dev channel

Dev channel gets hand-picked releases form older canary builds that have been tested for a while. Just like the canary channel, this channel is used to show people what is new as soon as possible. It is still very unstable and it should be only used to test new features. Dev channel releases are usually released weekly or monthly.

3.) Beta channel

If you are interested in using the new features, with minimal risk, beta channel is for you. Beta channel releases normally contain all the features that a team has decided to put in, but it is still expected to have some bugs and performance issues.

4.) Stable channel

Finally, the stable channel. This channel’s releases get the full testing and are the best to avoid crashes and other issues. In this channel Android Studio doesn’t change much more in its current version. You can expect reliability and good performance. This is probably why all the users will use this channel for production use.

Ok, I have explained the differences between the channels and you have probably seen that going down the list, channels get less, but more and more stable releases.

So now let’s focus on the different releases. To explain that I will use Android Studio 3.0 as an example. This version of IDE was released in the following releases:

1.) Canary release

Android Studio 3.0 began its journey as the canary release, because just like I have mentioned before canary releases’ intention is to showcase the new features. Although these builds are tested, they are still very unstable. 3.0 version of the Android Studio had 9 canary releases. Every canary release almost always provides some bug fixes or sometimes some new features. Documentation of the last canary release can be accessed here.

2.) Beta release

IDE went through its canary releases and showed the new features to the world. It had gotten some bug fixes and then the next step was the beta release. Beta release is usually more stable and usable, but it is still totally normal to experience some bugs. Android Studio 3.0 had 7 beta releases and it was slowly being polished to the final product. If you are interested in what the last beta release introduced, you can access the documentation here.

3.) RC release

RC stands for release candidate and it is also known as “going silver.” It is the last step before the stable release. At this stage Android Studio 3.0 was ready for use on a production site, but it had still not been marked as a stable version just in case if more bugs appeared. Android Studio 3.0 had 2 RC versions and only general bug fixes were introduced. The last RC release’s documentation can be found here.

4.) Stable release

Stable release is, as you might have guessed it, also known as “going gold.” This is the release most people are going to use, because hopefully it doesn’t have annoying bugs, it is performant and reliable. Link to the documentation is here.

Hopefully, I have managed to explain the differences between the releases and next time when the new version of Android Studio is released, you will know what to expect from it.

Thanks for reading! If you think that I forgot to mention something important, or I was wrong somewhere, please let me know in the comments!

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What is Android?

You see the word Android used a lot on the Internet, and it gets used interchangeably for a few different things. I’m not even talking about robots (though some Androids could be running on Android), I’m talking about the mobile platform we all love. And TV set-top boxes. And laptops. Pretty much everything except robots. OK, even robots.

Seriously, when we (or anyone else on the Internet talking about products based on Google’s operating system) say Android we’re usually talking about one of three different things.

The open Android

Google maintains an open-source operating system named Android. It’s got all the low-level «stuff» as well as the needed middleware to power and use an electronic device, and it is freely given away to anyone who wants to grab the code and build the operating system from it. There is even a full application framework included, so third-party apps can be built and installed, then made available for the user to run as they like.

The «proper» name for this is the Android Open Source Project, and this is what people mean when they say things like Android is open and free. Android, in this iteration, is free for anyone to use as they like.

You might have dabbled with this type of Android if you have used custom ROMs. Many third-party developers have taken AOSP and built it as-is for popular phones and tablets. It’s pretty bare-bones, but does have everything you need to power and use a smartphone. Or possibly a robot.

The popular Android

There’s a very good chance the Android you have in front of you isn’t just powered by the open Android — it needs some extra bits included to make a very different version of Android. Don’t feel confused just yet.

Whether you have a Nexus phone or a Samsung phone or a Motorola phone or any other brand of phone running Android, they all use a version of Android that has those extra bits. These extras aren’t part of the open Android, and you can’t freely distribute any of them (even it happens all the time, and generally nobody seems to be too bothered about it).

Your Galaxy S6 runs Android. So does your HTC M9. Or your Sony Xperia. Even your Nexus 5. But they are all very different from each other, and are also different from the open version of Android — which they are ultimately based on.

But they are still Android. We want the extras, whether they be the Google applications and Google Play, or the features that Samsung has added. This is the Android we all use and love.

The Android you’re holding

If you’re the type of person reading about Android on the Internet regularly, you know the phone you’re holding is a Samsung Galaxy S5. Or an LG G3. Or whatever. But for many folks (most people, I’d wager) they are holding an Android.

The same way that a Lumia 635 is a Windows Phone, or a BlackBerry Passport is a BlackBerry, or even an iPhone 4S is an iPhone, your Sony Xperia Z3V is an Android.

Lumping everything together isn’t such a bad idea. All (modern) Androids can run the same apps, use the same services from Google, and have our unrivaled love and affection. OK, maybe not that, but generally all Androids running Android as built from Android are as similar as they are different.

What does all this mean?

For starters, it makes things a bit confusing for folks not familiar with it all. Google uses the same name for two very different things (and so do we) because it mostly works. As consumers, we tend to make it worse because we like to call all Androids an Android (please, not Droid.) In the end, Android is Android — even if a few things have been added on top and it looks a bit different from other Androids.

• When someone from Google takes to Twitter and says «mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git:/ /android. git.kernel.org /platform/ manifest.git ; repo sync ; make» they are talking about one type of Android.
• When Google (or HTC or ASUS or anyone else) triumphantly tells us about how cool Android is on their latest phone or tablet, they are talking about another type of Android. Specifically, their type of Android.
• When your friend texts you to let you know they just bought a new Android from the AT&T store, they are talking about yet another type of Android.

We’ll leave dreaming of electric sheep for another blog post .

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Sharing Content between Android apps

Sharing is caring, as they say, but sharing on Android means something perhaps slightly different. ‘Sharing’ is really shorthand for sending content such as text, formatted text, files, or images between apps.

So if ‘sharing’ == sending content, it makes slightly more sense that it is implemented using ACTION_SEND (or ACTION_SEND_MULTIPLE) Intents and its dozen extras.

While that approach is perfectly valid, I prefer to use ShareCompat, a set of classes in the v4 Support Library designed to make it easy to build intents for sharing content.

Sharing text

Sharing plain text is, as you might imagine, a good place to start. In fact, there’s not a whole lot to it:

ShareCompat.IntentBuilder uses a fluent API where you can chain together multiple method calls, using only the ones you need. For sharing, one of the most important parts is picking the right mime type — this is how apps filter what type of content they can receive. By using text/plain, we signify that our Intent will only contain plain text. Then, of course, setText() is how we actually add the CharSequence to the Intent to send. And while you can certainly send styled text using setText(), there’s no guarantee that the receiving app will honor that styling, so you should ensure that the text is legible with or without styling.

You’ll note we then use resolveActivity() before calling startActivity(). As mentioned in Protecting Implicit Intents with Runtime Checks, this is critical to prevent an ActivityNotFoundException when there is no Activity available to handle the mime type you have selected. While probably not as much of a concern with text/plain, it may be much more common with other types.

Note: when you use startActivity(shareIntent), that respects any default apps the user has set (i.e., if they’ve previously selected sharing all “text/plain” items to a certain app). If you’d like to instead always show a disambiguation chooser, use the intent generated from IntentBuilder.createChooserIntent() as explained in the ACTION_CHOOSER documentation.

Sharing HTML text

Some apps, most notably email clients, also support formatting with HTML. The changes, compared to plain text, are fairly minor:

The differences here are that we use of setHtmlText() in place of setText() and a mime type of text/html replacing text/plain. Here ShareCompat actually does a little bit extra: setHtmlText() also uses Html.fromHtml() to create a fallback formatted text to pass along to the receiving app if you haven’t previously called setText() yourself.

Given that many of the apps that can receive HTML text are email clients, there’s a number of helper methods to set the subject, to:, cc:, and bcc: email addresses as well — consider adding at least a subject to any share intent for best compatibility with email apps.

Of course, you’ll still want to call resolveActivity() just as before — nothing changes there.

Receiving text

While the focus so far has been on the sending side, it is helpful to know exactly what is happening on the other side (if not just to build a simple receiving app to install on your emulator for testing purposes). Receiving Activities add an intent filter to the Activity:

The action is obviously the more critical part — without that there’s nothing that would denote this as an ACTION_SEND (the action behind sharing). The mime type, same as with our sending code, is also present here. What isn’t as obvious are the two categories. From the element documentation:

Note: In order to receive implicit intents, you must include the CATEGORY_DEFAULT category in the intent filter. The methods startActivity() and startActivityForResult() treat all intents as if they declared the CATEGORY_DEFAULT category. If you do not declare it in your intent filter, no implicit intents will resolve to your activity.

So CATEGORY_DEFAULT is required for our use case. Then, CATEGORY_BROWSABLE allows web pages to natively share into apps without any extra effort required on the receiving side.

And to actually extract the information from the Intent, the useful ShareCompat.IntentReader can be used:

Similar to IntentBuilder, IntentReader is just a simple wrapper that make it easy to extract information.

Sharing files and images

While sending and receiving text is straightforward enough (create text, include it in Intent), sending files (and particularly images — the most common type by far) has an additional wrinkle: file permissions.

The simplest code you might try might look like

And that almost works — the tricky part is in getting a Uri to the File that other apps can actually read, particularly when it comes to Android 6.0 Marshmallow devices and runtime permissions (which include the now dangerous READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE and WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions).

My plea: don’t use Uri.fromFile(). It forces receiving apps to have the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission, won’t work at all if you are trying to share across users, and prior to KitKat, would require your app to have WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE. And really important share targets, like Gmail, won’t have the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission — so it’ll just fail.

Instead, you can use URI permissions to grant other apps access to specific Uris. While URI permissions don’t work on file:// URIs as is generated by Uri.fromFile(), they do work on Uris associated with Content Providers. Rather than implement your own just for this, you can and should use FileProvider as explained in the File Sharing Training.

Once you have it set up, our code becomes:

Using FileProvider.getUriForFile(), you’ll get a Uri actually suitable for sending to another app — they’ll be able to read it without any storage permissions — instead, you are specifically granting them read permission with FLAG_GRANT_READ_URI_PERMISSION.

Note: we don’t call setType() anywhere when building our ShareCompat (even though in the video I did set it). As explained in the setDataAndType() Javadoc, the type is automatically inferred from the data URI using getContentResolver().getType(uriToImage). Since FileProvider returns the correct mime type automatically, we don’t need to manually specify a mime type at all.

If you’re interested in learning more about avoiding the storage permission, consider watching my Forget the Storage Permission talk or at least go through the slides, which covers this topic in depth at 14:55 (slide 11).

Receiving files

Receiving files isn’t too different from text because you’re still going to use ShareCompat.IntentReader. For example, to make a Bitmap out of an incoming file, it would look like:

Of course, you’re free to do whatever you want with the InputStream — watch out for images that are so large you hit an OutOfMemoryException. All of the things you know about loading Bitmaps still apply.

The Support Library is your friend

With both ShareCompat (and its IntentBuilder and IntentReader) and FileProvider in the v4 Support Library, you’ll be able to include sharing text, HTML text, and files in your app with the best practices by default.

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