Android Studio: Static phone preview

Question

Just installed Android Studio and installed a Nexus 5 emulator. Now, when designing apps in AS you commonly see a phone in the design tab. I do, but when adding new fields, texts, images etc the screen (both design and blueprint) stays static ie does not change. Note that when running the app my emulator works fine, but it seems I can't design it in real-time. There are no errors related to this, it's just static.

So as you can see in this image below, I have one text field and one image, when running it the emulator works fine. But the AS phone is just blank. How do I solve this so I can design more easily in Android Studio?

Static phone

Error messages

Answer 1

try to force refresh the layout

Answer 2

Your image shows the error clearly as

'Render error'
'missing constraint in ConstraintLayout'

As per documentation

Although a missing constraint won't cause a compilation error, the Layout Editor indicates missing constraints as an error in the toolbar. To view the errors and other warnings, click Show Warnings and Errors . To help you avoid missing constraints, the Layout Editor can automatically add constraints for you with the Autoconnect and infer constraints features.

Look for more details here

Add proper constraint and you will be able to see your UI components in the preview.