What’s new in Android
Pixplicity hosted DAUG’s annual Google I/O Extended viewing party in our Utrecht office yesterday.
The group is a Google Developer Group, organized by volunteers for members excited about new Google technologies. We’ve sponsored these communities for many years, with our very own Eliza Camber running Women Techmakers NL.
We’re psyched about many announcements at Google I/O this year, such as Machine Learning developments in healthcare applications and Waygo’s self-driving cars. What a time in which we live when John Legend’s voice can be trained through TensorFlow for Google Assistant!
Of course there were a lot of new things in Android, as well! Here are our favorite shiny new things.
- R8 is the Proguard replacement to go along with the new D8 dex compiler. It is now available with the preview Gradle plugin for Android Studio 3.2 by enabling it in your gradle.properties:
android.enableR8 = true - Jetpack is an excellent kickstarter for new projects as it encourages adopting best architecture practices. You can use it by selecting the “Activity & Fragment + ViewModel” template in Android Studio 3.2’s activity wizard.
- AndroidX is the way forward for the support libraries with smaller, more focused libraries.
- The new Navigation Editor in Android Studio 3.2 defines destinations in your app not just through a cool visual navigation graph, but actually in conjunction with the new AndroidX Navigation SDK.
- Portable Web Apps (PWA) are improved with push notifications, better performance and more. Desktop support is coming to Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
- Material design has been expanded with new components; take a look at the revamped material.io. Be sure to also check out the new icon flavors.
- ARCore now supports sharing AR experiences live with others with “Cloud Anchors” (which is a real game-changer!) and the long-awaited vertical plane detection.
- App actions and slices will be a relatively easy way to get your app integrated in other Google apps such as the Play store, the Google launcher and Google Assistant.
- New dynamic delivery features will provide device-specific and on-demand features in an Android app, although the latter is currently in private beta.
The future will tell how these things will impact the future of apps; many of these new features are unreleased or in private beta. We’re nevertheless really excited to toy with these new technologies and leverage them in cool new projects soon!
Of course I/O is still going on and there will be more news in the upcoming days. We will keep you posted on Twitter!
