Android Studio Super-Slow, Lagging & Crashes on Any New Window Opening- Mac, Need Help Debugging

Question

After the latest Android Studio updates on MacBook Pro I have been having an issue making Android Studio completely unusable!

Every time I open a new window in Android Studio it semi-crashes until I force quit the program. If I attempt to open preferences, or create a new activity or even install the newest Kotlin beta the program crashes. Anything to do with opening a new window (seems to be the common denominator) crashes Studio.

Here is what happens: The window opens full-screen, unlike previously where all windows would open as a popup window. Android Studio starts lagging with all button presses 30 seconds to 2 minutes, it also starts using over 100% CPU power, gets super hot and destroys the battery as a result. For information, my laptop is powerful enough to run many open applications simultaneously without even a hiccup such as 3d modelling, Xcode, Android Studio, Chrome, etc. So computing power and memory is no issue.

I tried opening windows and creating new activities in my main project as well as a brand new project just in case it was a project issue but nope, same problems. I tried googling and no such issues. I wanted to check here to see if anyone has any advice or quick fixes before I attempt to uninstall and re-install.

Answer 1

in my case, this happens whenever android studio opens a new tab.

i fixed it by changing the system preferences to never open new documents in a new tab, thanks to a post on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/jtbl4m/has_anyone_updated_to_macos_big_sur_and_is/.

System Preferences > General > Prefer Tabs "never" when opening documents.

Answer 2

Found the answer:

Run this in the terminal: defaults write com.google.android.studio AppleWindowTabbingMode manual

Source: Android Studio 4.1.1- MacOS BigSur - Freezing Problem in FullScreen