Android agent v6.0.0

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.