Now in Android #58
Android 13 DP2, MAD Skills Architecture, Android TV & Google TV integration, FHIR SDK, Large Screens, Play Developer Reporting API, Performance Class, and AndroidX releases
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
Android 13 DP 2 😍
Recently we shared Android 13 Developer Preview 2 with more new features and changes for you to try in your apps! Some notable features include Developer downgradable permissions which allows your app to protect user privacy by downgrading previously granted runtime permissions, and Bluetooth LE Audio which helps users receive high fidelity audio without sacrificing battery life; it can also seamlessly switch between different use cases that were not possible with Bluetooth Classic. Check out all the new features in the post!
MAD Skills: Architecture 😎
The new Architecture MAD Skills series has two new episodes.
Jose goes over the data layer and its two components: repositories and data sources. You will dive deeper into what the roles of these two are and understand their differences. You will also learn about data immutability, error handling, threading testing and more!
TJ covers the UI layer in this episode of MAD skills using the JetNews sample app as a case study You will learn UI Layer pipeline, UI state exposure, UI state consumption and more!
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.
Integrate with Android TV & Google TV series 📺
There are two more episodes in the Integrate with Android TV and Google TV series.
Miguel and Adekunle discuss account linking. Google Account Linking lets you safely link a user’s Google Account with their account on your platform, granting Google applications and devices access to your services and is needed for many integrations on Android TV & Google TV. They discuss the basics of OAuth like implementing your authorization, token exchange, and revocation endpoints. You will also learn the difference between the Web OAuth, Streamlined, and App Flip linking flows.
In the next video, Paul explores best practices for integrating and validating media sessions, the unified way for Android apps to interact with media content. MediaSessions allows different devices like smart speakers, watches, peripherals and accessories to surface and interact with playback and content metadata.
FHIR SDK for Android Developers 🏥
Community health workers in low-and-middle-income countries use mobile devices as critical tools for doing community outreach and providing crucial health services. Unfortunately, the lack of data interoperability means that patient records are fragmented and caregivers may only receive incomplete information. Last year, Google introduced a collaboration with the World Health Organization to build an open source software developer kit designed to help developers build mobile solutions using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) global standard for healthcare data. Read the article to learn more about how this SDK can help you create apps to aid community health workers in low-and-middle-income countries.
Helping Users Discover Quality Apps on Large Screens 🔎
Adoption of large screens is growing rapidly and now there are over 250M active Android tablets, foldables, and ChromeOS devices. To help people get the most from their devices, we’re making three big changes in Google Play to enable users to discover and engage with high quality apps and games: ranking and promotability changes, alerts for low quality apps, and device-specific ratings and reviews. Read all about it in the post!
Articles 📚
In this article Lauren talks about Android vitals which are a great way to track how your app is performing in Google Play Console. Now there are new use cases for Android vitals which include building internal dashboards, joining with other datasets for deeper analysis and automation troubleshooting and releases. Learn more about the API and how to use it in this post!
The Jetpack Core Performance library in alpha has launched! This library enables you to easily identify what a device is capable of, and tailor your user experience accordingly. As developer, this means you can reliably group devices with the same level of performance and tailor your app’s behavior to those different groups. This enables you to deliver an optimal experience to users with both more and less capable devices. Check it out in Don and Francois’ article.
AndroidX releases 🚀
Let’s take a look at what’s been up with AndroidX releases since the last episode of Now in Android.
We have a few libraries in alpha-01 including Activity Version 1.6.0-alpha01, CustomView-Poolingcontainer Version 1.0.0-alpha01, and Junit-Gtest Version 1.0.0-alpha01.
Car App Version 1.2.0-rc01 and Mediarouter Version 1.3.0-rc01 are also in rc-01.
Now then…
That’s it for this time with Android 13 DP2, MAD Skills Architecture, Android TV & Google TV integration, FHIR SDK, Large Screens, Play Developer Reporting API, Performance Class, and AndroidX releases. Come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.
