Author/Vice President of Product Management Sagar Kamdar
As developers, you build app experiences that help users around the world in ways you can’t imagine. At Android Developer Summit, we talked about how to focus on your users, understand their needs, build experiences that satisfy them, and focus on Android’s key theme: helping developers build great cross-device apps. We’ve updated our modern Android Development (MAD) offerings to help you be more productive, so you can focus on building great apps and scale these cross-device apps to all device types. One of the big updates is the big 12L feature update for foldable devices and tablets, a set of features optimized for Android 12 large-screen devices. Read on to learn more! Check out the 2021 Android Developer Summit Keynote video here.
Good app: Jetpack Compose now supports Material You
Our growing collection of modern Android development (MAD) development tools, apis, languages, and distribution technologies is at your side when it comes to building great apps. We’ve also introduced a number of new features in MAD to help You achieve this goal, such as the release of Material You and its new design concepts in Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern toolkit for building native UIs.
At Google I/O earlier this year, we introduced Material You for Android 12, which focuses on providing a personalized experience that fits every style, needs, and screen. We are now releasing the first Alpha release of Compose Material 3, which provides Material Design 3-style components and themes and enables Material You personalization features such as dynamic colors. We also released the first Beta version of Jetpack Compose 1.1, which includes stretch scrolling for Android 12, optimized touch target values, experimental delayed layout animation, and more. Jetpack Compose is solid and ready for production, and we continue to add the features you need to easily and quickly build Android UIs for all device types, as well as new support for Wearing OS and building home screen widgets.
Jetpack: More features to help you build great apps
In addition to Compose, Jetpack will continue to add features that everyone has been talking about. Navigation adds support for multiple return stacks. WorkManager is our recommended solution for persistent work, making it easier to handle Android 12 background limitations and adding support for rush jobs. Room adds automatic migration and multiple mappings. DataStore is our recommended alternative to SharedPreferences, currently available in version 1.0, while Macrobenchmark is a tool for measuring and improving startup and frame performance, adding simple but more accurate frame timing and downward compatibility to Android M.
Build cross-device applications
We also provide a series of updates to help you build applications for different Android device types. You can watch the video below to learn more about how we’re helping Spotify fulfill its mission across Android devices and multiple device types, connecting billions of fans to millions of creators. Check out the Android Developer Story: Helping Spotify Build cross-device Apps here.
12L and new tools designed for the big screen
The growth in big-screen devices is incredibly strong: Chrome OS sales grew 92% year over year, making it the fastest growing desktop operating system in the world; Last year, tablet sales grew 20 per cent, foldable devices — the latest and most innovative device category — grew two-and-a-half times… In all, there are more than 250 million big-screen Android devices in use, and Android is trying to build an operating system to match them. We also took the opportunity to release a developer preview of the Android 12L feature update, which includes updates specifically for larger screen devices. In 12L, we optimized and improved the UI for larger screen devices to make multitasking more powerful and intuitive, and we improved application compatibility and support to improve the “out of the box” user experience. In the 12L Developer Preview, you can try out the new big-screen features right away. Welcome to check out our previous tweet “Android 12L | Better for Big Screen Devices”.
Focusing on the Wear of OS
Many developers have built practical experiences for the latest version of Wear OS, released earlier this year, and we’re looking forward to a richer, more immersive app experience, as we’ve seen with Strava, Spotify and Calm. It’s much faster and easier to build uIs with Jetpack Compose, so we’ve introduced Compose support in Wear OS. The Wear OS version of Compose is now in developer preview, and we’ve provided new examples and documentation to get you started quickly. The Tiles API, currently in Beta, provides predictable and straightforward access to information and fast manipulation. We also worked with Samsung to make the theme design easier. With Watch Face Studio, created by Samsung, you can create your own dial themes without writing any code. Wysiwyg. Welcome to learn more about Wear OS updates.
Google Play: Rich features and continuous investment to help you achieve success
We offer a variety of ways to help you grow your business on Google Play. To enhance user trust, we’ve introduced a data security section to highlight your privacy practices, and a new Play Integrity API to ensure app installations are always authentic. We are also committed to building more tools and features to help you improve the quality of your applications. We also recently updated our pricing plan so that 99 percent of developers can now pay 15 percent or less. You can visit our previous tweets to learn more about the Google Play update. Check out the Google Play Update at a Glance at the 2021 Android Developer Summit video here.
More highlights: Android Developer Summit
We’ve posted over 30 technical sessions that you can watch at your own pace on the official website. We also provided a lot of live content retrospections, including #AskAndroid questions from the team that built Android, covering topics like modern Android development (MAD), large-screen devices, or Compose with Material You. In addition, you can watch the Android Code-Alongs review as Android experts write Code in real time, solve programming challenges, and answer questions in real time with Jetpack Compose and Wear OS version Compose. You can view the full video review.
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