Now in Android #47
MAD Skills: Hilt; Trackr on large screens; new Accessibility videos; Jetpack Compose tooling; Lottie.
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
MAD Skills: Kotlin & Android 🚀
The MAD Skills series continues to roll on, with technical content about modern Android development.
Hilt 🗡️
Hilt is Android Jetpack’s recommended solution for Dependency Injection; its MAD Skills series started this month and there are three new episodes!
Dagger and Hilt Engineer, Brad Corso teaches us about Hilt Under the Hood. This episode dives into how the Hilt annotation processors generate code, and how the Hilt Gradle plugin works behind the scenes to improve the overall experience when using Hilt with Gradle.
Check out the video below or the Medium article to learn more about Hilt under the hood!
Next, Android Software Engineer Daniel Santiago covers how to write your own Hilt Extensions. Hilt Extensions allow you to extend Hilt support to new libraries. Extensions can be created for common patterns in projects, to support non-standard member injection, mirroring bindings, and more.
Check out the video below or the Medium article to learn more about Hilt extensions!
Marcelo Hernandez, an Android developer at Tinder, delivers the next episode covering Migrating from Dagger to Hilt. While you will eventually want to migrate all your existing Dagger modules over to Hilt’s built in components, you can start by migrating application-wide components to Hilt’s singleton component.
Check out the video below to learn more about Migrating from Dagger to Hilt.
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.
Articles 📚
Jonathan Koren released a blog post on Trackr, a sample task management app where we showcase Modern Android Development best practices. This post takes you through how applying Material Design and responsive patterns produced a more refined and intuitive user experience on large screen devices. Check out the article here!
Accessibility series 🌐
There are two new episodes in the accessibility series. The first video by Shailen Tuli covers accessibility services like TalkBack, Switch Access and Voice Access and how they help users interact with your apps. Android’s accessibility framework allows you to write one app and the framework takes care of providing the information needed by different accessibility services.
The next video is by Caren Chang and covers labeling images for accessibility, such as content descriptions for ImageViews and ImageButtons.
Want even more accessibility? You are in luck, check out this entire new learning pathway aimed at teaching you how to make your app more accessible.
AndroidX Releases 📚
The Activity library is now in version 1.4.0-alpha01. The AndroidX ComponentActivity now implements the MenuHost interface which allows any component to add menu items to the ActionBar by adding a MenuProvider instance to the activity.
ADB Podcast Episodes
There have been two 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:
In Episode 174, Tor and Nick are joined by Chris Sinco, Diego Perez and Nicolas Roard to discuss the features added to Android Studio for Jetpack Compose. Tune in as they discuss the Compose preview, interactive preview, animation inspector, and additions to the Layout inspector along with their approach to creating tooling to support Compose’s code-centric system.
In Episode 175, Chet, Romain and Tor have a chat with Gabriel Peal from Tonal, well known for his contributions to the Android community on projects such as Mavericks and Lottie. They talked about Lottie and how it helps designers and developers deliver more delightful user experiences by taking complex animations designed in specialized authoring tools such as After Effects, and rendering them efficiently on mobile devices. They also explored the challenges of designing and implementing a rendering engine such as Lottie.
Now then…
That’s it for this time, with MAD Skills series on Hilt; an article on Trackr, new Accessibility videos, Jetpack Compose tooling and Lottie. Come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.
