Android Developers Blog

Luli Perkins , Developer Relations Program Manager Our second edition of #AndroidDevJourney is here! At the beginning of this year we launched the #AndroidDevJourney to share the stories of members of our community through our social platforms. Each Saturday, from January through June, we’ll feature a new developer on our Twitter account . For a chance to be featured in our March spotlight series, tweet us your story using #AndroidDevJourney. Andrew Kelly Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started. In 2012 I was working as a contractor for the NSW government here in Australia as a Java J2EE web developer. I'd been in that role for 11 years, building web apps for students and teachers. However, in 2012 the government decided that contractors were expensive and let us all go. So while in my hand-over period I'd read about some kids who were writing Android apps and making lots of money doing so. The Android Market was new and so any ap...

Posted by Nick Grayson, Product Manager Android works best when it helps developers create apps that people love. That’s why we are dedicated to providing useful APIs like Activity Recognition which, with the user’s permission, can detect user’s activities (such as whether a user is biking or walking) to help apps provide contextually aware experiences. So much of what we do relies on a good night's rest. Our phones have become great tools for making more informed decisions about our sleep. And by being informed about sleep habits, people can make better decisions throughout the day about sleep, which affects things like concentration and mental health. In an effort to help our users stay informed about their sleep, we are making our Sleep API publicly available. What is the Sleep API? The Sleep API is an Android Activity Recognition API that surfaces information about the user’s sleep. It can be used to power features like the Bedtime mode in Clock . This sleeping information is ...

Posted by Erica Hanson , Global Program Manager, Google Developer Student Clubs Google Developer Student Clubs , a program of university based community groups for students interested in Google developer technologies, recently started hosting study groups called Android Study Jams . The goal? Learn Android app development through hands-on codelabs in an online curriculum provided by Google. There are two tracks: one for students who are new to programming, and one for those who already have experience. Interested in participating? Facilitator materials are available for anyone to host Android Study Jams in their community - take a look and get to building. Google Developer Student Clubs are dedicated to helping students learn programming together, among peers, in a fun and interactive setting. While over 50 thousand students from all over the world have participated in these Android workshops, we wanted to highlight the exciting work from groups in Indonesia, Turkey, and Nigeria. F...

Posted by Anna-Chiara Bellini , Product Manager, Nick Butcher , Developer Relations Today, we’re launching the beta release of Jetpack Compose , our new UI toolkit designed to make it faster and easier to build native apps across all Android platforms. Compose offers modern, declarative Kotlin APIs, helping you build beautiful, responsive apps with way less code. Built to integrate with existing Android apps and Jetpack libraries, you can adopt Compose at your own pace by combining Android Views and Compose. With this beta release, Compose is API complete and has all the features you need to build production-ready apps. Beta also means API stable, so we won’t change or remove APIs. Now is a great time to start learning Compose and begin planning for how you will use it in an upcoming project or feature once it reaches 1.0 later this year. What's In Beta Our team has been developing Compose in the open with feedback and participation from the community. Since open sourcing deve...

Posted by The Jetpack Compose Team Jetpack Compose is Android’s modern toolkit for building native UI. It enables you to quickly bring your app to life with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs. With the Beta of Jetpack Compose released today, this is the perfect time to learn Compose and get ready to adopt it. To help you get started with Jetpack Compose we are launching a new #AndroidDevChallenge! For the next four weeks, the #AndroidDevChallenge will be launching a series of weekly challenges to help you build better apps faster with Jetpack Compose. Oriented around “lift off insights," each challenge focuses on a new area of Compose, from animations to Material Theming, composables to lists and more! Compete to win new prizes for each challenge, with over one thousand prizes to win including a Pixel 5. 1 The first challenge starts today! The challenges Every week brings a new challenge with its own rules and tasks. Every Wednesday starting today we’ll p...

Posted by The Jetpack Compose Team In less than 24 hours, we're giving you a backstage pass to Jetpack Compose , Android's modern toolkit for building native UIs, on #TheAndroidShow . Hosted by Kari Byron, you'll hear the latest on Jetpack Compose from the people who built it, plus a fireside interview with Android's Dave Burke. The show kicks off live at 9AM PT! Broadcasting live on February 24th at 9AM PT, you’ll be able to watch the show at goo.gle/TheAndroidShow , where you’ll also be able to find more information and links to all of the things we covered in the show. Or if you prefer, you can watch directly on YouTube or Twitter . There’s still time to ask your Jetpack Compose questions, use #TheAndroidShow Got a burning Jetpack Compose question? Want to learn about annotating a function type with @ Composable? Or how to add a static parameter to Composable functions at the compiler level? Tweet us your Jetpack Compose questions now, using #TheAndroidShow. We...

Posted by Chet Haase , Developer Relations Engineer We recently finished another series of MAD Skills videos - this time on Motion Layout. We covered ways in which you can use the API and the design tool to create rich, custom, and complex animations for your users. Check out the episodes below to increase your knowledge and skills in different areas of the Motion Layout API and design tool. And watch the live Q&A episode, featuring engineers on the Motion Layout and Developer Relations teams. Episode 1 - ConstraintSet Animations This video explores how ConstraintSets are used to define different states of your UI that you animate between. Along the way, Sean shows how to use Motion Editor in Android Studio to create and edit these transitions. Episode 2 - Keyframes This episode shows how to use Keyframes in a MotionLayout animation to customize the animation by altering the values of various properties over time. For example, you can use keyframes to change the path an objec...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Every day, Android apps help billions of people work, play, communicate, and create on a wide range of devices from phones and laptops to tablets, TVs, and cars. As more people come to rely on the experiences you build, their expectations can rise just as fast. It’s one of the reasons we share Android releases with you early: your feedback helps us build a better platform for your apps and all of the people who use them. Today, we’re releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 12, the next version of Android, for your testing and feedback. With each version, we’re working to make the OS smarter, easier to use, and better performing, with privacy and security at the core. In Android 12 we’re also working to give you new tools for building great experiences for users. Starting with things like compatible media transcoding, which helps your app to work with the latest video formats if you don’t already support them, and easier copy/paste of ri...

Posted by Hoi Lam , Android App Quality Since the launch of Android more than 10 years ago, the platform and the user’s expectations have grown. There are improvements from user experience through material design to the importance and advancement in privacy . We know you want your apps to offer a great user experience. At the same time, we also know that it’s not always straightforward to know which area to tackle first. That’s why we are launching a new App Quality section in our developer site to help you keep up-to-date with key aspects of app quality and provide related resources. In the first release, we have updated the Core App Quality checklist to take into account recent Android releases as well as the current trends of the app ecosystem. Here are some highlights in this update: Visual Experience - We highlight the best practice of using Material Design Components in place of platform components such as buttons. This will give your app a modern look as well as m...

Posted by Ting-Yuan Huang ‎, Software Engineer and David Winer , Product Manager Today we are excited to announce the alpha of Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP), an all-new tool for building lightweight compiler plugins in Kotlin. KSP offers similar functionality to KAPT , however it’s up to 2x faster, offers direct access to Kotlin compiler features, and is being developed with multiplatform compatibility in mind. KSP is compatible with the Kotlin 1.4.30 release and onwards. You can check out the open source code and documentation in the KSP GitHub repository . Why KSP? The #1 request we hear from Kotlin developers is to make build speeds faster. Many developers iterate on and deploy apps dozens of times a day, so having to sit around waiting for a slow build can be very time consuming. One of the biggest challenges with compiling Kotlin code is that Kotlin doesn’t have a native annotation processing system. Annotation processors like Room are ubiquitous on Android and rely on Java an...