Glance is a recent addition to the suite of Jetpack libraries. It was introduced to make it faster and easier to build app widgets for surfaces such as the home screen. Glance is built on top of the Jetpack Compose runtime and requires Compose to be enabled in order to…

CameraX currently provides CameraView, a View that displays a preview of the camera, while also providing methods to take pictures, control the camera, and query camera information. …

Android’s biometric APIs allow for secure authentication on the Android platform. They manage a system-provided biometric authentication prompt, and provide a seamless experience by supporting various authentication types, including biometric ones such as fingerprint and face, as well as non-biometric types like PIN, password, and pattern.

Android Q introduced new thermal APIs to allow better handling of thermal issues. This article goes over why these APIs were needed, the information and controls they provide, and how you can test your app under different thermal stress levels. The need for thermal APIs An Android device undergoes thermal stress when the amount of…

AndroidX App Startup is a new addition to the Jetpack suite of libraries. This article takes an initial look at it, and focuses on 3 things: Why it was created, what it is, and how you can get started using it. Why AndroidX App Startup? It isn’t uncommon for libraries to run some initialization…

Passing data between Fragments can be achieved in various ways, including using the target Fragment APIs (Fragment.setTargetFragment() and Fragment.getTargetFragment()), ViewModel or the Fragments’ parent Activity. …

Android Jetpack CameraX: PreviewView — A common use case for any camera app is to display a preview from the camera. So far, this has been quite difficult to get right, mostly due to the complexities that exist around the camera2 API edge cases and varying device behaviors. …

Mobile users interact with apps in many ways, a major one is through touch. Following motion guidelines and supporting common touch gestures goes a long way toward providing an intuitive experience to your users. This article goes through the basics of touch gestures in Android, including single touch gestures, multi-touch…

Fragment constructor injection is now -and has been for a while- supported in Android thanks to FragmentFactory. While it isn’t an API developers have to use, it can be regarded as a better design approach in certain situations and can help when testing Fragments with external dependencies. This article explains…