It's been almost exactly 18 months since it was announced at I/O 2013, but Android Studio has finally hit version 1.0. Well, almost. This is a release candidate, so it's pretty close to what will become the first official stable release. For this release, the Android Tools team has been focusing on getting the bugs fixed and improving stability, but there are a couple of notable changes, as well.

Left: old splash screen, Right: new splash screen.

The most obvious change comes in the form of a brand new logo. Android Studio is trading out a variant of the classic bugdroid logo for a Material-inspired drawing compass. There are also some additional animations and polish that pop up here and there. On a more functional level, this version also adds a local Maven repository which includes the Android Gradle plugin and all of its dependencies. This means it'll be possible to create a new project without a live Internet connection – without hacking one out from an existing project, that is. That's it for the official changelog, but there were also some pretty big bug fixes, all of which are readily available in Gerrit (platform/tools/adt/idea, platform/tools/base, and platform/sdk).

From briefly poking around, I haven't had any problems with the IDE itself. The build script update didn't go quite as well. It turns out that the BuildType.runProguard method has been deprecated. The fix is pretty simple. Just open your app's build.gradle file and change runProguard to minifyEnabled (you can leave it enabled or disabled, if you like). While you're at it, you might also add shrinkResources true to cut down on unused resources that may be added by imported dependencies. Hopefully this will save a few frustrating minutes and a couple of Google searches. But, hey, what's an Android Studio update without a broken build script? –___–

There's already a known issue that can cause the Android Studio Setup Wizard to prompt users to install the SDK on each startup. So far, I haven't witnessed this behavior, so it doesn't affect everyone. There's a workaround, but it's probably not worth the trouble. Nonetheless, a note on the page makes it clear there will be an RC2 coming before there's an officially stable 1.0.

Android Studio 1.0 RC1 is currently available only in the canary channel. If you've been keeping up with canary builds, just check for updates and start downloading. Patches should weigh in at roughly 85-90 MB. If you switched to the beta channel, like so many developers did after it became an option at I/O 2014, you can switch over by going to Preferences -> Updates, and change the selection in the dropdown. There are also manual install packages available for download if you'd like to get a fresh start.

Source: Google+, Android Tools site