The Android Show is back with a new episode that covers the latest in Android development, including:
- The release of Android 14, including an interview where Dave Burke joined Rebecca Gutteridge to discuss the latest with Android 14 from Generative AI, software performance, and much more!
- Wear OS 4 and the Pixel Watch 2, including the new declarative XML Watch Face Format, and enhanced capabilities for tiles.
- Studio Bot updates, including an interview with Jamal Eason, where he covered the latest Studio Bot updates.
Anirudh Dewani has written a summary of the show, and you can catch all the updates on the official Android Developers Youtube channel.
On the latest episode of PolicyBytes, we provided numerous Google Play Policy updates including:
- Device and Network Abuse: Only phone and alarm apps that require high priority notifications will automatically be granted the screen intent permission on Android 14. Other apps can request full screen intent permissions if their core functionality requires it.
- Health Apps: All health apps are subject to Google’s privacy, deception, and device abuse policies. They must have a privacy policy that is easily accessible to users that discloses any dangerous or runtime permissions and how they use user data.
- Photo and Video Permissions: Apps must have
READ_MEDIA_IMAGESandREAD_MEDIA_VIDEOpermissions to have broad access to user photos and videos. Apps that need to access photos and videos on shared storage must pass a review and demonstrate a core use case. We recommend using the photo picker if possible, which doesn’t require permissions, offering better privacy protection. - AI Generated Content: Developers must provide features that allow users to report or flag offensive AI generated content.
Compose received a number of updates including new APIs for drag and drop, along with a faster and more reliable Compose Compiler.
Here are the latest AndroidX releases:
- RecyclerView 1.4.0-alpha01 includes bug fixes and performance improvements, including a reduction to the amount of memory RecyclerView uses.
- Wear ProtoLayout 1.1.0-alpha01 includes support for zoned date-time formatting, the ability to create and manage dynamic data values, and support for positioning the edge content in EdgeContentLayout before other content.
- Wear Tiles 1.3.0-alpha01 includes the ability to provide the context as a preview method parameter, as well as a module for wear tiles tooling updated for tile preview support
- WebKit 1.9.0-alpha01 includes the ability to create multiple browsing sessions between WebViews, APIs to modify how Attribution Reporting events are registered, support for WebTransport, and support for the Web Share API.
For all the AndroidX release notes see, Recent Release Notes.
Ben Weiss wrote an in-depth article on Jetpack Benchmark 1.2.0, a major release that includes a number of new features and improvements. The baseline profiles API is now stable, allowing you to capture the performance of your app on a specific device and configuration, and then use that profile to measure performance improvements over time.
Jetpack Benchmark 1.2.0 also includes:
- New benchmarking modes: Macrobenchmark and microbenchmark modes allow developers to measure the performance of their app at different levels of granularity.
- Full tracing: Full tracing allows developers to capture a complete trace of their app’s execution, including all CPU, GPU, and memory activity.
- Improved reporting: The reporting API has been improved to make it easier to understand and analyze benchmark results.
Chris Arriola covered how to adopt Jetpack Compose for View-based libraries. He dove into topics such as:
- Creating a Compose wrapper for a View-based library
- Using Compose to implement custom views
- Migrating existing View-based libraries to Compose
André Labonté featured The Google Contacts app and JetPack Glance.
Jetpack Glance is a new API that allows developers to create widgets that are updated at a glance. Glance widgets are visible on the lock screen and home screen, and they can be updated without the user having to open the app.
The Google Contacts app used Jetpack Glance to create a new widget that shows the user’s most recently contacted people. The team was able to create the widget 25% faster using Glance, and they were also able to reduce the widget’s size by 20%.
Finally, we held a Passkey week from October 23 to October 27th where developers learned everything they needed to know to successfully implement passkeys.
The team also hosted a live Q&A session with Engineers across Google that answered community questions.
Android Developer Story: KAYAK reduced sign-in time by 50% and improved security with passkeys
The video shares how KAYAK used passkeys to reduce sign-in time by 50% and improve security, discussing the challenges that KAYAK faced when implementing passkeys, and how the team overcame them.
