Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
Last week was Google I/O, which means that we have a ton of stuff to cover; this post can serve as your guide to navigate all that content.
First off, we had the Google Keynote, which had a ton of announcements about where Android and Pixel are heading. Then, the Developer Keynote covered top Android dev announcements such as the Compose for Wear OS Beta, the Compose 1.2 beta, the Health Connect API, and large screen updates including 12L and 13 features along with the large-screen-optimized Google Play Store.
We have two quick videos — a quick run through of what’s new, and #TheAndroidShow: What’s new for Android devs at I/O, in 60 seconds to move you quickly through some of the top material. For a more complete survey of what I/O 22 offers to Android developers in video form check out the What’s New in Android talk.
Finally, the Android Fireside Chat is back; Android leaders answered your questions from the stage.
After being available on this blog, our YouTube series, and a podcast, starting today, you can check out the alpha version of the Now in Android app on GitHub that was featured in the Google I/O 2022 Developer Keynote 🎉
The app showcases best practices, opinionated designs, and solutions to complex real-world problems. It does so with an open source implementation of a real world app — a working app planned for publication on the Play Store that will help you keep up to date with your Android development areas of interest. It’s still under heavy development and isn’t yet feature complete, so stay tuned here for updates.
What’s new in Jetpack covered additions and updates to the over 120 libraries we’ve created to address common pain points and make development easier. Highlights include updates to Room, Navigation, the new JankStats library, and the 1.2 beta of Jetpack Compose. Compose 1.2 includes improved nested scrolling Interop, support for downloadable fonts, improved support for Lazy layouts, and more.
Other talks in this area include Lazy layouts in Compose, Fragments: The good (non-deprecated) parts, and Performance best practices for Jetpack Compose.
We also have two workshops: Basic layouts in Compose and Using state in Jetpack Compose. There’s also an associated Android Developer Story about how Airbnb uses Jetpack Compose.
The ever-popular What’s new in Android development tools talk went through the Android Studio and Tools roadmap, demonstrated some new features, and covered key product updates. The Android Studio Dolphin Beta includes Logcat v2, WearOS and Compose enhancements, and Gradle managed virtual devices, while the Electric Eel Canary adds SDK Insights, Live Edit, Visual Lint, and Multi-Preview for Jetpack Compose, Device Mirroring, Resizeable Emulator, and App Quality Insights.
Android went large at I/O, with four talks and a workshop to take you from design to implementation for large screens. Designing apps for large screens talks about how to expand and reorganize your UI purposefully, covering our three canonical layout starting points for large screens.
Learn how to update your app for the larger screen goes over the tech we’re providing to making building for large screens easier, such as window size classes, sliding pane layout, navigation rail, the Jetpack DropHelper utility class for drag and drop, and the resizeable and desktop emulators.
Implementing Android apps for all screen sizes explores development best practices with an emphasis on Jetpack Compose, navigation, managing state, and testing.
Input for all screens includes best practices to support input methods like keyboard, mouse, and stylus.
Finally, in the Building an adaptive layout with SlidingPaneLayout workshop, you’ll learn how to add a list and detail layout to a hybrid Compose and View app with SlidingPaneLayout. There’s also an associated Android Developer Story about eBay’s tablet optimization.
We released the second beta for Android 13, and announced that the Android 13 Beta is available to test on a range of devices from Asus, Lenovo, Nokia, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Sharp, TECNO, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE.
Developing privacy user-centric apps covers new Android 13 features such as the notification runtime permission, the permission-free photo picker, and APIs to revoke permissions.
In Building the Privacy Sandbox, a panel of Privacy Sandbox team members gives an overview of the industry-wide effort to make Android and the web private, answering popular questions. Overview of the Privacy Sandbox on Android focuses specifically on key Android changes and technical considerations for developers, covering both the SDK Runtime and privacy-preserving APIs for targeting user interests, maintaining custom-defined audiences, and attribution reporting.
Basics for System Back covers the new opt-in API in Android 13 that lets you tell the system that you’re handling back ahead of time to make the back experience more predictable and fluid; this behavior is planned to be the default when targeting Android 14.
Best practices for running background work on Android explains how background work is changing in Android 13 to improve consistency across devices in the ecosystem, along with new JobScheduler features, changes to app restrictions, Firebase Cloud Messaging, and more.
What’s new in Android machine learning covers updates to the two main ways of using on-device ML in your apps. ML Kit, our ready to use mobile ML stack, and Android’s custom ML stack. ML Kit enables acceleration across key API surfaces and expands API capabilities, while the custom ML stack includes beta support for TensorFlow lite in Google Play Services, the new Acceleration Service for Android, and the rollout of updatable Neural Networks API and TensorFlow Lite delegates. The new Google Code Scanner API in Google Play Services allows your app to request barcode scans without needing camera permissions.
What’s new in Android Camera provides a … snapshot … of what we’re doing in CameraX, such as support for video capture and WYSIWYG camera controls, as well as what’s happening in Android 13, with support for HDR video capture, while What’s new in Android media covers how we’re handling HDR media, Spatial Audio support, Performance Class 13, and the work we’re doing in ExoPlayer, Jetpack Media3, and the new Jetpack Core Performance library. You can stream the How to optimize media streaming with ExoPlayer workshop to go hands-on with adding media streaming to your app using the Media3 ExoPlayer library — including setting up playback, supporting adaptive streaming and responding to playback events.
What’s new in Android accessibility covers the updates we’re making to Android around accessibility, including Android 13’s built-in support for braille displays, auto-summarizing the content of photos (Lookout), listening in noisy environments (Sound Amplifier), and more. The What’s new in Accessibility for developers talk details how you improve the usability of your app for everyone, covering both Jetpack Compose’s and Android Studio’s accessibility features.
What’s new in app performance covers using Android Studio, Perfetto, Android Vitals, and Macrobenchmark to help understand performance. It demonstrates using baseline profiles to help guide Android’s ahead-of-time compilation to improve app startup speed and reduce janky frames. It also covers the unbundled ART Runtime on Android 12+, which includes updates to the OpenJDK APIs, as well as performance updates including the new garbage collector, faster JNI calls, reference processing, and interpretation.
Finally, Introducing Google Wallet and developer API features details what we’re doing to build a premier, secure digital wallet for Android and Chrome users, as well as how you can use the Google Wallet API to digitize tickets, loyalty cards, and much more, evolving the previous Google Pay Passes API.
Android lets you build for TVs, watches, cars, and smart speakers, with the phone at the center of the connected world. We want to create an experience that works better together, and we need your help. That begins with using Android solutions for seamless sign-in across devices, with APIs like One Tap, Passkeys, and Block Store; this allows users to easily work across multiple types of devices and makes it easy for them to replace a device.
The Build powerful, multi-device experiences talk covers a new library that leverages Ultrawideband, BLE, and Wi-Fi to enable multi-device experiences; it supports device discovery/wake-up, secure communications, and multi-device transfer to build seamless handoff experiences.
The Create beautiful, power-efficient apps for Wear OS takes you through the Wear OS compose beta as well as how the Health Services APIs help you to build power-efficient health and fitness apps across different underlying hardware.
Speaking of health, the Introducing new APIs for health and fitness in Health Connect by Android talk covers how the Health Connect alpha brings together Google Fit, Fitbit, and Samsung Health into one consolidated API.
The What’s new with Android TV and Google TV talk recaps the Android 12 improvements and takes you through new Android 13 features such as expanded picture-in-picture support, AudioManager changes, and more.
What’s new with Android for cars covers our progress and updates with Android Auto, Android Automotive OS, and the upcoming 1.3 release of the Car App Library; the 1.3 release adds map interactivity across all map templates, navigating to multiple destinations, dynamically updating point of interest list destinations, and alerts for things like traffic cameras/new rider requests.
What’s new in Google Play covers key Play updates around Privacy and Security including the Google Play SDK Index, Play App Signing moving to use Google Cloud Key Management, Annual Key Rotation, the Play Integrity API, the Data Safety Section, and the Privacy Sandbox. It goes through app quality initiatives such as the Google Play Developer Reporting API, Android Vitals Crashlytics integration, Revenue and Revenue Growth Metrics in Reach and Devices as well an overhauled device catalog, and test tracks for different form factors. Finally, it details the work we’re doing to optimize acquisition, engagement, and monetization, such as updates to custom store listings, store listing experiments, updates to LiveOps (beta), and new commerce updates such as new payment methods, expanded ultra-low price points, more flexible subscriptions, and in-app subscriber messaging. The App quality on Google Play and Success on Google Play with new acquisition, engagement, and monetization tools sessions cover these areas in more detail.
We also had two talks that cover How to integrate Android widgets with Google Assistant, as well as what one needs to do to Integrate Google Assistant into Android for cars.
Let’s take a look at a few highlights from our AndroidX releases since the last episode of Now in Android.
As mentioned before, Jetpack Compose 1.2 beta 1 is out along with Wear Compose 1.0 beta 1. To help you with large screens we released Drag And Drop Version 1.0.
Tracing Version 1.1.0 was released, adding Trace.forceEnableAppTracing() to force-enable app trace section capture on non-debuggable builds prior to the introduction of the profileable manifest tag in API 29.
Health-Connect-Client Version 1.0 alpha01 is out, the new API for reading/writing fitness and health records shared by other apps.
There has been one episode of Android Developers Backstage posted since the last Now in Android. Check it out at the link below, or in your favorite podcast client:
In this episode Tor, Chet, and Romain chat with Jon and Andrew from the Play team about the Play Store app, which recently went through a major refactoring. Jon and Andrew guide you through the reasons why they did it, the impact on their architecture, what problems they ran into, and why they decided to adopt Jetpack Compose for the UI layer.
That’s it for this time with Google I/O 2022, the Now in Android App open source alpha, Android Jetpack, Jetpack Compose, Android Studio, Android 13, Google Play, Large Screens, TV, Cars, Wear OS, and more! Come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.
