One day in April of 2019, my current boss called me after a morning meeting and told me to register for Google I/O in 2019. I didn’t want to go at first, but I thought the company would reimburses me anyway, so I just signed up. Unexpectedly, I won the ticket. Today is the third and last day of I/O, and I haven’t updated the technology blog for a long time anyway, so I would like to introduce the Google I/O experience in this article.

Some highlights of Google I/O this time

I accidentally got up late on the first day, and by the time I got to the venue, KeyNote had already started

The woodcutter is talking excitedly about Google’s advances in artificial intelligence this year.

  1. Google’s ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) Mobile Assistant this year officially dispenses with the wakeup word “Hey Google” to automatically answer users’ needs in the context of their conversation.
  2. Google Lens can automatically analyze bills and make payments automatically. Take photos and analyze the food, automatically search for online recipes and videos of how it’s made

Meanwhile, more than 2.5 billion Android devices have been registered worldwide.

Android ART can extract a user’s profile from the Google Playstore. After uploading, subsequent users can use the profile file to accelerate the app launch.

Google AR/VR has also made new progress, but I was surprised to find that 2016’s Project Tango has made a lot of VR implementations and attempts, such as this year’s shark stage VR effect.

By the time I came here in 2016, it was completely possible. I don’t know if that’s a rehash.

I am also interested in Android Auto, and one of my friends is planning to go there recently

Before the voice and questioning voice are a lot of cloud game platform, but only a small booth… I remember when Google announced Stadia there was a lot of buzz, but this year’s Google I/O Keynote didn’t even mention it. It was so low-key that it was really confusing.

This time Google IO feeling

Sessions for Android development, to be honest, I’ve been pretty disappointed this year. As an Android developer, Google I/O has little to offer developers this time around. A lot of things are the same.

For example, this year’s Modular APP build session was a reworking of last year’s Dynamic Feature. (Who says Google doesn’t allow Android to be plugged-in? They’re just nationalizing it. You only need the governor to set the fire and not allow people to light the lights, which unfortunately only works through the Google Playstore.)

Android dynamic framework App Bundles

The most important thing I can remember is Kotlin First, an empty slogan… ConstraintLayout is no longer a new concept.

But all kidding aside, this Session with Coroutine is starting to make me reconsider whether RxJava, the exploding framework, is really the solution to asynchronous problems. Since Google released the Architecture Component, LiveData and Kotlin’s Coroutine have solved most of the code isolation, asynchronous processing, lifecycle processing, and so on. RxJava is great, but the learning curve is too steep and complex (some of my friends on the current team just can’t understand flatMap…). “, kind of like a cannon hitting a mosquito.

I and big factory counterparts on android development prospects of some views, some feelings of Android development

Of course, I/O, not really need to learn anything, and the purpose is also to meet some old friends. My previous employer did well this year and brought the entire Android team to the conference. I do not hesitate to do a east, please eat dinner. Long time no see, San Francisco has become my home, Singapore friends as guests.

And took this opportunity to exchange with Google and Uber friends about the future of Android development, as well as some points we are focused on next.

First the conclusion:

Mobile development will never die, only substandard development will die.

Mobile development entered the era of explosion in 2014-2015, the legendary Peking University Jade Bird graduates 10,000 monthly salary is indeed a fact. In the days when you could start a business by making an app for Android and iOS, a lot of mobile development jobs were created. Moreover, the immature mobile development at that time led to the birth of many development frameworks. There were numerous frameworks for downloading and reading images. ImageLoader, Picasso,Glide, and even Volley all had codes for image loading. The open source community for mobile development is also thriving, and in the age of wild growth, there are many heroes.

However, by the time a few years passed and the market didn’t need so many startups any more, a large number of them were eliminated, and even the open source community calmed down. The reason is simple, and I’ll give you one.

Uber’s friends say that Uber has open-source a UI framework called Ribs that most people probably haven’t heard of or used. Why is that? Because it doesn’t fit. Uber is an App that focuses 90% of its functions on just 10% of the page. To put it simply, it is a single-page App, so its UI design philosophy does not apply to most apps. Because of this, most companies won’t adopt it. Even he himself was confused when he first started working at Uber. Sometimes he just wanted to add a TextView; under the Ribs design there were many new classes. The reason for the complexity and functional isolation of single-page apps will be fully understood.

Having said all that, the point I’m trying to make is this. We have gone through the era of mobile development when new technologies came out and everyone started to pay attention to them. Of course, because of mobile development and its stability, the iteration rate of new technologies has slowed down significantly, and big companies have started to focus on their own business. As a result, development or technology has become business-oriented. Whether it’s mobile development or the backend, if it doesn’t add to the company’s offerings, it needs to be phased out. Whether we can improve the product by using the existing technology is a question that mobile development engineers should focus on. Android development is the same. Big companies continue to hire, to hire high quality software engineers, software engineers who can solve real problems for the product, for the company.

This is what I’ve always wanted to say to all mobile developers: you’re a software engineer first, and you specialize in mobile development second.

In 2016, I came to the United States for the first time and participated in Google I/O, which inspired me to come to the United States. They all said that I should have a small goal every three years. In the first three years, I spent a lot of effort to come to America. In the next three years, I set myself the goal of being the Tech lead of android group of our company as soon as possible. I believe I can make it!