Now in Android #104
Android Studio Jellyfish, A/B testing power consumption with the new Power Profiler and new AndroidX releases!
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
In this final episode before Google I/O, we’ll cover Android Studio Jellyfish, A/B testing power consumption with the new Power Profiler and the new AndroidX releases!
Most of the content of this post is available in the form of a video or podcast, so feel free to watch or listen rather than read on. (Or do all three to help you remember! There won’t be a quiz.)
Android Studio Jellyfish goes stable 🧠
Android Studio Jellyfish and Android Gradle Plugin 8.4 is now available in the stable channel with many new features such as:
- Gemini as your coding companion for Android development.
- Access real devices with Device Streaming
- App Quality Insights support for ANRs, custom data, and multi-events.
- New colorblind checks using the UI Check mode from Compose Preview.
- Redirect audio from connected physical devices to your computer using device mirroring.
- Automatic Baseline Profiles compilation when installing your release app locally, and when using low overhead profiling.
- Behavior changes coming with Android Gradle Plugin 8.4
- New Sign-in flow that enables many Google developer services all directly from the IDE.
Check out the release page to learn more and download the latest version.
Android Developers blog 📝
Mayank and Yasser published an article on how to effectively A/B test power consumption for Android apps. Android Studio’s new Power Profiler visualizes the app’s power usage as it runs, empowering you to identify and address the power consumption issues. You can easily run A/B tests to compare the power consumption of different algorithms, features or even different versions of the app.
AndroidX Releases 🚀
With Google I/O approaching we have a bunch of interesting updates in Android Jetpack:
With Activity 1.9.0, ComponentActivity now implements OnUserLeaveHintProvider to allow components to implement callbacks for onUserLeaveHint events. This version of Activity raises warnings on API usages that can break Predictive Back Animations. Plus, remainder of the Activity APIs have been rewritten in Kotlin and all extensions previously available in activity-ktx.
DataStore 1.1.0 now supports multiple processes accessing the same file, with support for observability across processes. The new Storage interface allows you to customize how to store or serialize your data models. This release also comes with support to use DataStore in Kotlin Multiplatform projects.
Room 2.7.0-alpha01 is just released. This release comes with support to use Room in Kotlin Multiplatform projects.
Compose Material 3 Common Version 1.0.0-alpha01 brings new themeless components that can be used to build Material Design components
Webkit Version 1.12.0-alpha01 adds a new API to enable Web Authentication in WebView.
Media3 Version 1.4.0-alpha01 includes changes, new features and bug fixes to many APIs and ExoPlayer.
Make sure to check out the AndroidX release notes here to learn more.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for this week with Android Studio Jellyfish, A/B testing power consumption with the new Power Profiler and new AndroidX releases!
Make sure to get ready for Google I/O and check back soon for your next update from the Android developer universe! 💫
