Android Dev Summit 2019 Highlights

Aman Bansal
Nov 1 · 4 min read

In this blog I’ll highlight some announcements from Android Dev Summit 2019 which was held October 23–24, 2019, at the Google Event Center (MP7), 1160 Bordeaux Dr, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.

👉🏻 Jetpack Compose

I would be lying if I say there was not much to talk about Jetpack Compose.

Android’s modern toolkit for building native UI. Compose simplifies and accelerates UI development on Android with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs.

Compose makes it easy to build beautiful, native apps. It provides a declarative way to build UIs which makes your code more intuitive and concise. Inspired by Kotlin, you can adopt Compose at your own pace thanks to seamless compatibility with the existing UI toolkit.

👉🏻Android Studio 4.0 Canary

The first Canary release was launched. Android Studio 4.0 includes , Code Completion, and a full sample of a Compose app.

Motion Editor

Android Studio 4.0 includes a visual design editor for the MotionLayout layout type, making it easier to create and preview animations.

Try out AS 4 from here

👉🏻Jetpack APIs are growing up

Jetpack is designed to solve real-world problems you face every day, and is used by over 84% of the top 10,000 Play Store apps.

  • Flow support
  • Pre-package databases
  • 1:1 and m:n relations
  • Gradle incremental annotation processor
  • Schema default values
  • Expanded projections

CameraX simplifies the development experience and lets you focus on your app instead by addressing the differences between the many devices in the Android ecosystem, like Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Motorola, LG who are already unifying behind CameraX. Previewed at Google I/O, CameraX will be available in Beta in December.

Jetpack Benchmarking was announced at Google I/O earlier this year, and it’s now available as a release candidate. Google says this library will make it easier to test the performance of your app, and pinpoint exactly where there are problems. If you’re having performance issues in your app, check it out.

View-binding is an easier way to access Views from your code. It is a type-safe solution with minimal build-time impact, no more findViewById(), no more annotation processors.

👉🏻Updated Associate Android Developer certification

An updated Associate Android Developer certification, now with Kotlin, which could be a great way for junior developers to test out their skills and improve their resume.

👉🏻Android Developer Challenge

Over ten years ago, they announced the first Android Developer Challenge. Today, modern Android is shaping the next generation platform. So it seems kind of fitting to announce: the Android Developer Challenge is back! The first Developer Challenge they’re announcing is Helpful Innovation and Machine Learning. Take Live Captions: for the almost 500 million people who are deaf and hard of hearing, Live Captions bring content to life and is exactly the type of machine learning-powered innovation we expect to see more of someday, and with your help we can turn someday into today. You can read more about the challenge here.

There were several other announcements and developer sessions in the Android Dev Summit. You can checkout other sessions here

Now that’s it for this story, hope you have learned something new today.

If you like this story, don’t forget to clap 😉

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