Android Developers Blog

Posted by Iliyan Malchev (Project Treble Architect), Amith Dsouza (Technical Account Manager) , and Veerendra Bhora (Strategic Partnerships Manager) Extending Android updates on Qualcomm’s Mobile Platforms In the past few years, the latest Android OS has been adopted earlier by OEMs and deployed in larger numbers to our users. The growth in adoption has been driven by OEMs delivering faster OS updates, taking advantage of the architecture introduced by Project Treble. At the time Android 11 launched there were 667M active users on Android 10, 82% of whom got their Android 10 build via an over the air (OTA) update. Despite the events throughout 2020, there is a continued momentum among our partners to either launch their devices on Android 11 or offer Android 11 OTAs on their devices earlier. Our efforts till now have been focussed on making OS updates easier and faster to deploy. The other side of this coin is supporting updates for a longer period of time, and today we’d like to provi...

Posted by Eric Bahna, Product Manager In October, we published the Android for Cars App Library to beta so you could start bringing your navigation, parking, and charging apps to Android Auto. Thanks for sending your feedback with our issue tracker , so we know where to improve and clarify things. Now we’re ready to take the next step in delivering great in-car experiences. Today, you can publish your apps to closed testing tracks in the Google Play Store. This is a great way to get feedback on how well your app meets the app quality guidelines , plus get your in-car experience in front of your first Android Auto users. Three of our early access partners: T map, PlugShare,and 2GIS We’re preparing the Play Store for open testing tracks soon. You can get your app ready today by publishing to closed testing. We’re eager to see what you’ve built!

Posted by Christopher Katsaros; Your #MADscore tabulator We’ve been talking to you a lot recently about modern Android development (MAD), through the MAD Skills series . Now it’s time to see: what’s your MAD score? From how many Jetpack libraries you’re using to what percent of your app is coded in Kotlin, today we’re launching a MAD scorecard that shows just how modern an Android developer you are. Your MAD scorecard uses Android Studio to tell you interesting things like how much size savings your app is seeing through the Android App Bundle. It spotlights each of the key MAD technologies, including specific Jetpack libraries and Kotlin features you could be using. You’ll even get a special MAD character based on your MADest skill (who knows, you just might be a MAD scientist…). Here’s how to get your scorecard You can get a personalized look into your MAD score through a new Android Studio plugin, here’s how to get and share your scorecard: Step 1 - Install the plugin: Throug...

Posted by Nick Rout It’s a wrap_content! The third topic in the MAD Skills series of videos and articles on Modern Android Development is complete. This time around we covered Material Design Components (a.k.a MDC). This library provides the Material Components as Android widgets and makes it easy to implement design patterns seen on material.io, such as Material Theming, Dark Theme, and Motion. Check out the episodes and links below to see what we covered. We designed these videos to closely follow our recent series of MDC articles as well as existing sample apps and codelabs, so you’ve got a variety of ways to engage with the content. We also had a Q&A episode featuring engineers from the MDC team! Episode 1: Why use MDC? The first episode by Nick Butcher is an overview video of this entire MAD Skills series, including why we recommend MDC, then deep-dives on Material Theming, Dark Theme and Motion. It also covers MDC interop with Jetpack Compose and updates to Android S...

Posted by Frank van Diggelen, Principal Engineer and Jennifer Wang, Product Manager At Android, we want to make it as easy as possible for developers to create the most helpful apps for their users. That’s why we aim to provide the best location experience with our APIs like the Fused Location Provider API (FLP). However, we’ve heard from many of you that the biggest location issue is inaccuracy in dense urban areas, such as wrong-side-of-the-street and even wrong-city-block errors. This is particularly critical for the most used location apps, such as rideshare and navigation. For instance, when users request a rideshare vehicle in a city, apps cannot easily locate them because of the GPS errors. The last great unsolved GPS problem This wrong-side-of-the-street position error is caused by reflected GPS signals in cities, and we embarked on an ambitious project to help solve this great problem in GPS. Our solution uses 3D mapping aided corrections, and is only feasible to be done at ...

Posted by Murat Yener , Developer Advocate Today marks the release of the first Canary version of Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) , together with Android Gradle plugin (AGP) version 7.0.0-alpha01. With this release we are adjusting the version numbering for our Gradle plugin and decoupling it from the Android Studio versioning scheme. In this blog post we'll explain the reasons for the change, as well as give a preview of some important changes we're making to our new, incubating Android Gradle plugin APIs and DSL . New versioning scheme With AGP 7.0.0 we are adopting the principles of semantic versioning . What this means is that only major version changes will break API compatibility. We intend to release one major version each year, right after Gradle introduces its own yearly major release. Moreover, in the case of a breaking change, we will ensure that the removed API is marked with @Deprecated about a year in advance and that its replacement is available...

Posted by Jamal Eason , Product Manager Today marks the release of the first version of Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) on the canary channel, together with Android Gradle plugin (AGP) version 7.0.0-alpha01. With this release, we are adjusting the version numbering of Android Studio and our Gradle plugin. This change decouples the Gradle plugin from the Android Studio versioning scheme and brings more clarity to which year and IntelliJ version Android Studio aligns with for each release. New versioning scheme - Android Studio With Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) we are moving to a year-based system that is more closely aligned with IntelliJ IDEA, the IDE upon which Android Studio is built. We are changing the version numbering scheme to encode a number of important attributes: the year, the version of IntelliJ it is based on, plus feature and patch level. WIth this name change you can quickly figure out which version of the IntelliJ platform you are using in Android Studio. ...