Now in Android #42
App Bundles, Navigation, Wear Compose, Android for Cars, Nearby APIs, Coroutines, Foldable devices, and more!
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
NiA42 in Video and Podcast Form
This Now in Android is also offered in video and podcast form. It’s the same content, but with less reading required. The article version (keep reading!) is still the place to come for links to all of the content that’s covered.
Podcast
Click on the link below, or just subscribe to the podcast in your favorite client app.
App Bundles 📦
Google Play will start requiring new apps to be published with the Android App Bundle starting August 2021. This will replace the APK as the standard publishing format.
If you haven’t made the switch to app bundles yet, read the blog post to know the benefits of app bundles and how they help both developers and users.
MAD Skills: More Navigation wrap-up 🧭
The series on More Navigation finished since the previous Now in Android, ending with a livestream Q&A. Thanks for all the questions, and navigate over to the recording to see what happened.
As usual, there’s a wrap-up blog for the series, with all of the links to the episode videos and articles, plus links to relevant technologies:
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.
AndroidX Releases 🚀
A new library in alpha is core-splashscreen that provides backwards compatibility for the Splash Screen APIs in Android 12. The APIs are backported down to API 23!
Jetpack Compose and DataStore have now reached release candidate status meaning the 1.0 stable releases are right around the corner!
Now that Jetpack Compose is going stable soon, more and more technologies will start adopting it. And that’s already the case of… WearOS! Wear Compose is a new library to write apps for Wearable devices using Jetpack Compose. It supports Wear Material Design and the first alpha version of the library just landed. Read more about what’s included in the release notes!
Articles 📗
Better physical stories with Google’s Nearby APIs
In the Nearby APIs series, Isai Damier explains the different journeys available that require physical proximity: One-way message detection, two-way communications, and device-pairing with Fast Pair.
The first part of the series is about the first use case, the Nearby Messages API that allows you to send small binary payloads between internet-connected Android and iOS devices.
Two-way communication without internet: Nearby Connections
In the second part of the Nearby APIs series, Isai Damier goes through the second use case: two-way communication that allows users to connect with each other even when no Internet is available. But this also allows unlimited amounts of data to be transferred using the Nearby Connections API.
Scope Storage Myths
Apps will be required to update their targetSdkVersion to API 30 in the second half of the year. That means your app will be required to work with Scoped Storage. In this blog post, Nicole Borrelli busts some Scope storage myths in a Q&A format.
Advanced Usage of WorkManager in multi-process apps
WorkManager 2.6 supports Workers to run in any process and allows them to be bound to a particular process. Read how Caren Chang explains the WorkManager multi-process APIs.
repeatOnLifecycle API design story
Read my blog post to know how the new lifecycle-aware repeatOnLifecycle coroutine API was designed and why other APIs were removed from the lifecycle-runtime-ktx library to help developers prevent errors.
Tabletop mode on foldable devices
In this blog post by Francesco Romano you will learn a simple and efficient way to adapt your app’s layout when it runs on foldable devices.
Android for Cars 🚗
The Android for Cars App library launched in April brought navigation, parking, and charging apps to your car. Now, a new version 1.1 is in alpha with features such as sign-in template, long message template, multiple-length text, and map interactivity.
ADB Podcast Episodes 🎧
There have been a couple of episodes of Android Developers Backstage posted since the last Now in Android. Check them out at the links below, or in your favorite podcast client:
Episode #168: Material Composition is the third episode of our mini-series on Jetpack Compose (AD/BC), where Nick and Romain are joined by Clara Bayarri and Matvei Malkov to talk about Compose’s support for Material Design. They discuss how Compose supports Material Components and Material Theming out of the box, how you can customize your composables, Material You, and more!
In Episode #169: Testing, Romain and Tor are joined by Adarsh Fernando, Arif Sukoco and Yahan Zhou from the Android Studio team to cover the recent improvements to testing such as automated test snapshots, the Test Matrix tool, and the unified Gradle test runner, and Gradle managed virtual devices.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for this time. Go MAD for information on the future of App Bundles, and more Navigation in the last MAD Skills series! Check out the new alpha libraries for core-splashscreen, Wear Compose, and Android for Cars. Read the latest articles about Nearby Messages API, Nearby Connections API, WorkManager in multi-process apps, the design of the repeatOnLifecycle API, and tabletop mode on foldable devices! Listen to the latest ADB podcasts! And come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.
