By Karen Ng, Director, Product Management & Jacob Lehrbaum, Director of Developer Relations, Android & Play

As Android developers, we are committed to creating an experience that satisfies users around the world. With users relying more than ever on your applications and expecting more from you, your job as a developer is getting harder. Today at Google I/O, we introduced some new initiatives that will help you. These include Android 12 — one of the biggest design changes to Android ever; And Jetpack, Jetpack Compose, Android Studio, and Kotlin to help you build beautiful, high-quality apps. We’ll also help you extend your app to other devices, such as wearables and large-screen devices. Check out the developer Conference keynote here for more details, and here’s a quick rundown of some of the highlights.

Android 12: One of the biggest design updates ever

The first Beta of Android 12 is out now, and it contains a lot of cool updates. Includes brand new user security features such as improved Bluetooth and approximate location permissions; Enhanced performance representations, such as expedited Jobs and launch animations; And an enjoyable experience with newly designed widgets and over-the-top scroll-and-stretch effects, one of the biggest design updates to Android ever. You’re welcome to learn more about Android 12 Beta 1 and start preparing your app for the official release later this year. Install Android 12 Beta on your device today!

Jetpack Compose: Get ready for release 1.0 in July!

Over the past few years, we’ve been trying to modernize the Android development experience. We listened to your feedback and continued to be open, which is the hallmark of Android. At the same time, we are figuring out the right way to do things. You can see these changes through our tools, such as Android Studio, a high-performance IDE that can keep up with you; Kotlin, a programming language that lets you do more with less code; And the Jetpack library, which solves some of the most difficult problems in mobile development and is backward compatible.

The next step in these efforts is Jetpack Compose, our modern UI toolkit that makes it easy to build beautiful apps for all Android devices. We launched Compose at Google I/O two years ago, and we’ve been building it openly, and we’ve been listening to your feedback to make sure we stay on track. With the launch of the Compose Beta earlier this year, developers around the world have created some of the most beautiful and innovative experiences in half the time it takes them to create them, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well you’ve done in the #AndroidDevChallenge. Click here to see Have Fun composing! Video.

With the upcoming Material You update, we’ll be adding new Material components, as well as further support for large screen builds, allowing You to quickly and easily build gorgeous user interfaces. We are conducting the final stress test for Compose and will release the 1.0 stable version in July. Please get ready!

Android Studio Arctic Fox: Design, Devices, and Developer productivity!

Also released today is Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) Beta, the latest official release of the powerful Android Integrated Development environment that will help you build quality apps more easily and quickly. By updating this powerful suite of tools, we’ve been able to go one step further in three areas: accelerating UI design, extending applications to new devices, and increasing developer productivity. With this new release, you can create modern UIs with the Compose tool, view test results on multiple devices, and use App Inspector to optimize for debugging databases and background tasks. We also provide Accessibility Scanner to make your application’s Accessibility experience easier, and Memory Profiler to optimize application performance. To speed up building, we have released Android Gradle plugin 7.0, new DSL and variant API. Learn more about the Android Studio update here.

Kotlin: The language most commonly used by professional Android developers

According to our recent survey, Kotlin is now the most commonly used language among professional Android developers. Kotlin is used in more than 1.2 million apps on the Play Store and 80% of the top 1,000 apps. Developers inside Google also love Kotlin: More than 70 Google apps, such as Drive, Home, Maps, and Play, use Kotlin. Kotlin Symbol Processing, a powerful yet simple API for parsing Kotlin code directly, is also released today with a new Kotlin native annotation Processing solution, It is twice as fast as Room and other development libraries.

Android Jetpack: Write features, not template code

We’ve built a development library with Android Jetpack to help you reduce your template code and focus on the functional code you care about. More than 84% of the top 10,000 apps are using Jetpack. Today, there are additional highlights in the Jetpack library, including Jetpack Macrobenchmark (Alpha), which captures large interactions that affect app launch and lag before your application is released; And a new Kotlin coroutine API, Jetpack DataStore (Beta), for more efficient persistence of data. You can learn more about the Android Jetpack update here.

Now is the time: A big step for Wear

The great thing about modern Android development is that these tools are built to help you easily develop for the new age of Android, that is, to make the devices connected to your phone: TV, car, watch, tablet, etc., work better together.

Today, we took a big step forward with wearables. First, we launched a unified platform with Samsung that combines the best of Wear and Tizen. Second, we introduced a new user experience, including improved Google apps. As well as Fitbit’s world-class health and fitness services. For Android developers, this means that your audience will be much larger, and that all the skills, tools, and apis that make your mobile apps great can also help you develop on a single wearable platform for users around the world.

Whether through the new Jetpack API on Wear, customized for small screens designed to optimize battery life, or the Jetpack Tiles API, you can create custom Tiles for all devices in the Wear ecosystem. We have a number of new features in place to help you build on Wear. Through a new set of health and fitness apis created in partnership with Samsung, the collection of sensor data and the calculation of metrics, including heart rate, calories and daily distance walked, is now more concise, consistent and accurate, all from one trusted source. With the release of Android Studio Arctic Fox Beta, all of these new features have come together, making it easier to pair test apps, and even including a virtual heart rate sensor in the emulator. We’ve introduced some major updates to discoverability, so when your Wear apps are released, they’ll be easier to find on Google Play as well. You can read more details about Wear updates here. Click the link on the right to see Android Developer Story: Spotify on Wear OS video.

Further unlock the potential of big screens like tablets, Chrome OS and foldable devices

When it comes to big-screen devices like tablets, foldable devices and Chrome OS laptops, the momentum is strong. People are relying more on these big-screen devices for everything from staying in touch with family and friends, to studying in school, or working remotely. In fact, there are currently more than 250 million active large-screen Android devices. Last year, Chrome OS grew 92 percent year on year, five times the growth rate of the PC market, making Chrome OS the fastest growing and second most popular desktop operating system. To help you capture this momentum, we’ve provided apis and tools that make it easier to optimize the big-screen experience: For example, with SlidingpaneLayout 1.2.0 and the new vertical navigation component, auto-fit your content to more space, provide maximum width on the component to avoid stretching the UI, and updates to the platform, Chrome OS, and Jetpack WindowManager, Make your application work better by default. You can learn more here.

— Google Duo optimized for foldable devices

The above is just the tip of the iceberg in our efforts to make it easier for you to build high quality Android applications. We’ll be releasing more than 20 technical talks on Android and Play, covering background tasks, privacy, machine learning on Android, and 12 tips to get you started developing on Android 12. If you’re interested in developing for cars, TVS, and wearables, we’ve also prepared content for you. Check out the Google I/O site. In addition to talks and news, there were plenty of interesting ways to interact with Googler and other developers online at this year’s Google I/O conference. You can check out Android Dome in I/O Adventure, where we’ve prepared a wealth of blog posts, videos, Codelab and more. You can also test your Jetpack Compose skills for yourself, or take a ride in the Dome’s virtual car.

Your feedback and questions about your products are very important to us. Please send us your feedback via the QR code below. Chances are your questions will appear in the next FAQ and be answered. Thank you for your support!