Jun 16, 2021
Now in Android #41
Android 12 Beta 2, Navigation with Multiple Back Stacks and Feature Modules, AppSearch, Indie Games, and more!
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
Android 12: Beta 2 🤖
The second beta release for Android 12 is now available!
Read the blog for more details on what’s new, including the Privacy Dashboard with a new way for your app to give a rationale for permission usage, mic and camera indicators along with an easy way to turn mic and camera feeds off, and a clipboard read notification —in other words, the privacy features we talked about at I/O, now ready for you to test.
As always, check out the Android 12 Beta site for information about behavior changes, new features /APIs, and more. Most importantly: try out your app on the new release and send us feedback with any issues you have. We’re halfway through the beta process so there’s not much time left to experience the joys of using pre-release Android 12.
Indie Games Accelerator and Festival 🎊
We announced thats submissions are now open for the Indie Games Accelerator and Indie Games Festival from Google Play. The accelerator provides mentorship for indie game studios with recently or soon-to-be launched games, while the festival is a place to submit a recently- launched game to compete for featuring, promotions, and other prizes. You can apply for either program by July 1st.
MAD Skills: Navigation 🧭
The MAD Skills series continues after a brief I/O pause with more technical content about modern Android development.The more navigation series from Murat Yener added a highly requested topic: navigation with multiple back-stacks. This is part of the recommended Material pattern for bottom-navigation, but, until recently, there was no easy way to implement it
Murat also covered navigation in feature modules, including ones delivered with Play Feature Delivery. Since these modules are not downloaded at install time but only when the app requests them, you can use the dynamic features navigation library to include the graph from the feature module.
Also, we did a blog post and a short video update for all of the MAD Skills content from I/O, so you don’t have to comb through all of our sessions to learn what’s MAD.
But Wait, There’s More MAD content!
For ongoing content, be sure to check the MAD Skills playlist on YouTube, the articles on Medium, or this handy landing page that points to all of it.
I/O Top Three
We’ve been recapping the highlights of I/O in 90-second video segments combined with blog posts. In addition to the aforementioned MAD Skills, we also covered Android 12, as well as the work we’ve done with form factors including Wear, Auto, Tablets, Foldables, and TV.
Articles
Speaking of support for multiple back stacks, Ian Lake gave us a deep dive into Multiple back stacks and some of the work it took to make this feature happen in Fragments and Navigation on our Medium blog.
We blogged about the new Jetpack AppSearch library for doing high-performance on-device full text searches.
Meghan covered how Android 12 prevents touch events from being delivered if these touches first pass through a window from a different app. This is a behavior change, so it happens regardless of the targetSdkVersion. It helps ensure that users can see what they are interacting with. Read on to learn about alternatives, to see if your app will be affected and how you can test to see if your app will be impacted.
Manuel covered injecting an application-scoped CoroutineScope using Hilt, allowing you to launch new coroutines that follow the app lifecycle or to make certain work outlive the caller’s scope.
Android Developers Backstage
There have been three new episodes of Android Developers Backstage posted since the last Now in Android.
ADB released episode #165, where Chet and Romain chatted with Hunter and Nick from the Material Design team about recent additions and improvements to the Material Design Component libraries: transitions, motion theming, Compose, large screens support and guidance, etc.
Episode 166 has Chad and Jeff from the Android Security team joining Tor and Romain to talk about… security. They explain what the platform does to help preserve user trust and device integrity, why it sometimes means restricting existing APIs, and touch on what apps can do or should worry about.
Episode 167 is the second episode of our mini-series on Jetpack Compose (AD/BC), where Nick and Romain are joined by Anastasia Soboleva, George Mount and Mihai Popa to talk about Compose’s layout system. They explain how the Compose layout model works and its benefits, introduce common layout composables, discuss how writing your own layout is far simpler than Views, and how you can even animate layout.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for this time with a new Android 12 Beta, some advanced Navigation guidance, cool stuff for indie game developers, AppSearch, and more. Listen to the design, security, and Compose podcasts, and please, come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe!
