Android agent release notesRSS

Welcome to the New Relic Android agent version 6.0. This major release breaks compatibility with older 2.x and early 3.x versions of the Android Gradle Plugin (AGP).

New in this release

Adds Distributed Tracing support

The agent will now add Distributed Tracing headers to instrumented network requests. This feature is enabled by default, but can be disabled through the DistributedTracing feature flag.

Refer to How New Relic distributed tracing works for more information on Distributed Tracing in mobile apps.

Exclude variants from instrumentation

Variant builds can now be selectively excluded from instrumentation during builds. Build types or product flavors are excluded through the New Relic Gradle plugin extension:

newrelic {
    // do not instrument these build variants
    excludeVariantInstrumentation("debug", "chocolateRelease")
}

Updated requirements

The minimum supported SDK level (minSdkVersion) is now 24 (Android 7.0) The minimum supported Android Gradle plugin version is now 3.4 using Gradle 5.1.1 or higher.

Fixed in this release

• Bluetooth and ethernet connections are now correctly identified.

• Fix build crash involving manifestPlaceholder replacement when used with AGP 4.1.

• Remove unused compile dependency on the support-v4 Android support library .

Support statement:

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly and at a minimum every 3 months. As of this release, the oldest supported version is 5.22.1.

Fixed in this release

• Crash reports uploads are sent immediately for wired connections (i.e., AndroidTV). Previously, crashes were deferred until the first harvest of the next app launch.

Android Gradle Plugin Support

• This will be the last version of the Android agent to support versions 2.+ of the Android Gradle Plugin.

Support statement:

New Relic recommends that you upgrade the agent regularly and at a minimum every 3 months. As of this release, the oldest supported version is 5.21.3.

New in this release

Improved attribute validation

The agent will no longer reject events containing invalid attributes. Attributes that fail basic event validation are pruned from the map of provided event attributes. We've also corrected an event creation error where attribute maps containing null keys would result in events with a subset of passed attributes.

This applies to attributes passed torecordCustomEvent(), recordEvent() and recordBreadCrumb() API methods.

Map uploads are now compressed by default

To disable compressed uploads, add the following to the newrelic.properties:

com.newrelic.compressed_uploads=false

Fixed in this release

• Fixes the java.lang.LinkageError runtime crash when instrumenting OkHttp 4.9
• Fixed IllegalArgumentException thrown during builds when the agent inspects classes compiled with JDK 9 and higher. Classes compiled with JDK 9 through JDK 11 are now inspected for instrumentation

Fixed in this release

• Fixed MissingPropertyException thrown by newRelicInstrumentTask when building with Android Gradle Plugin 2.x

New in this release

Enhanced the New Relic Gradle plugin's build-time reporting of ProGuard/DexGuard maps

• Maps will only be reported during select variant builds (i.e., Release)
• Build variants are assigned unique build IDs
• Maps can be compressed prior to upload

Please refer to Android agent crash reporting for more detail regarding these features. These features are configurable through the New Relic Gradle Plugin extension and existing newrelic.properties.

Fixed in this release

• Fixed build errors that occur when older (pre-3.0) versions of the Android Gradle Plugin is used
• Fixed 'IllegalStateException' crash that resulted when header queries were made to failed HttpsUrlConnection requests

New in this release

• Updated for Android Gradle Plugin 4.0
• See the Android compatibility matrix here

Fixed in this release

• Missing O/S versions for Android 9 and above are now reported as undefined
• O/S major versions that were reported as empty string are no longer recorded if the agent is unable to determine a value
• OkHttp2 and OkHttp3 requests are now reporting bytesSent in HttpRequests, when available
• Interaction counts reported as zero are now recorded with the correct value

Fixed in this release

• Fixed additional incompatibilities with DexGuard and AGP 3.6
• Fixed automatic map uploads for some variants types, broken in the previous hotfix (our apologies)

Fixed in this release

• Fixed detection of DexGuard-generated mapping.txt files ("mappingFile is null")
• Update OkHttp request transaction state when interceptors are used
• Improved visibility into obfuscation map uploads. Users can invoke the Gradle task newRelicMapUpload{Variant} (newRelicDexguardMapUpload{Variant} for DexGuard) to resend tagged obfuscation maps. {Variant} is dependent on configuration.
• Toned-down plugin debugging messages inadvertently emitted as errors

New in this release

• Adds support for Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) version 3.6. AGP 3.6 requires version 5.25.0 of the New Relic agent. Previous agent versions are not supported with 3.6.
• Apache HttpClient instrumentation is deprecated

Fixed in this release

• Fix unhandled exception when closing a Cronet HttpUrlConnection on error conditions
• Fixed OkHttp2/Retrofit crash when reading error response bodies
• Better content length/bytes received reporting for OkHttp2 and OkHttp3

Known issues

The New Relic agent may not correctly detect the 'mapping.txt' file using Dexguard and AGP 3.6. We are looking into the issue.