Now in Android #65
Android 13 Beta 4, Predictive back gestures, Jetpack Compose, Wear OS, Text gradients, Large screens, System UI, and more!
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
Episode 65 Video and Podcast
Now in Android is also offered as a video and podcast.
Android 13 Beta 4
We’re just a few weeks away from the official release of Android 13! Meanwhile, we published the last Beta for your testing and development. We reached Platform Stability at Beta 3, so all app-facing surfaces are final, including SDK and NDK APIs, app-facing system behaviors, and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces. With these and the latest fixes and optimizations, Beta 4 gives you everything you need to complete your testing.
Take a look at the blog post for everything you need to check and test. Watch for information on the official Android 13 launch coming in the weeks ahead! Until then, feel free to continue sharing your feedback through our hotlists for platform issues, app compatibility issues, and third-party SDK issues.
10 years of Google Play
In 2012, the team opened the (digital) doors of Google Play. A decade later, more than 2.5 billion people in over 190 countries use Google Play every month to discover apps, games and digital content. And more than 2 million developers work with us to build their businesses and reach people around the globe! Congratulations to the Google Play team for this huge milestone.
Android Basics with Compose Unit 3 available
The Unit 3 of Android Basics with Compose course is available already! Unit 3 covers how to build apps that display a list of data and how to make your apps more beautiful with Material Design.
This is a continuation of the previous units that starts with learning programming basics and creating your first Android app, and continues with the fundamentals of Kotlin, and building more interactive apps.
https://developer.android.com/courses/android-basics-compose/course
Jetpack Compose 1.2 is now stable
This release contains new features like downloadable fonts, lazy grids, and improvements for tablets and Chrome OS with better focus, mouse, and input handling.
Read the blog post for more information about the new features and APIs, the bugs fixed, and the updated Compose public roadmap.
Compose for Wear OS is now 1.0
The first stable release of our modern declarative UI toolkit is designed to help developers create beautiful, responsive apps for Google’s smartwatch platform.
Compose for Wear OS makes building apps for Wear OS easier, faster, and more intuitive by following the declarative approach and offering powerful Kotlin syntax. Moving forward, Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building user interfaces for Wear OS apps.
Read the blog post for more information about what’s included in the 1.0 stable release, the tooling available in Android Studio, and how to get started.
AndroidX releases 🚀
Apart from the Jetpack Compose 1.2 and Compose for Wear OS 1.0 stable releases, there has been a bunch of interesting stuff released in AndroidX.
Stable are also the Core splashscreen v1.0, and Profile Installer v1.2. In RC, you can find AppCompat v1.5, Compose Compiler v1.3 that brings support to Kotlin version 1.7.10, Emoji2 v1.2, and ShareTarget v1.2. Lastly, Wear Tiles v1.1 reached its first beta version
See the rest of AndroidX releases in this link.
Articles 📚
Roberto Orgiu wrote about how to make your app large screen ready! Give it a read if you want to know how to get started with large screen support and why it is so important. Accurately handling orientation changes, aspect ratios, and adaptive layouts may seem challenging, but with new large screen experiences in mind, multiple form factors bring new possibilities to your users.
Ataul Munim wrote about Wear OS 3! You don’t need a physical device to test your Wear apps. Read this article to take a brief look at unique UI surfaces on Wear OS, create a Wear emulator and explore it from a user perspective.
Chris Arriola wrote about Jetpack Compose interop: Using Compose in a RecyclerView which covers what versions of Compose and RecyclerView you need to use to get the best performance. Furthermore, you’ll understand how the interop works under the hood.
Alejandra Stamato wrote two blog posts about text coloring in Compose. The first one, Brushing up on Compose Text coloring, is a very colorful blog post about how to work with Brush API together with TextStyle to achieve complex text coloring like giving a gradient to your text in a simple way.
The second one, Animating brush Text coloring in Compose 🖌️, covers how to animate gradients in your text using the Brush API and Compose animations. Go check them out, I can’t stop looking at those animations now!
Diego Zuluaga and Jason Tang wrote the Prepare your app to support predictive back gestures blog post. Predictive back gestures is a feature that will be available in future versions of Android. However, to give you more time to adopt it, we made it available in the developer options of Android 13 Beta 4. Read the blog post for details on how to try out the new gesture and support it in your apps. Spoiler alert: it’s straightforward for most apps!
ADB Podcast Episodes🎙
There has been one episode of Android Developers Backstage posted since the last Now in Android. Check it out at the link below, or in your favorite podcast client:
In Episode 187: System UI: A Retrospective, Tor and Chet meet Dan Sandler and Adam Cohen from the SystemUI team. They dip into a bit of history, talking about where things were at when they joined the team, and how things have developed in the many years since. They also talk about how to expose (or not) gestures and features in a UI system.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for this time, with Android 13 reaching Beta 4, 10 years of Google Play, articles on large screens and Wear OS 3, Compose interop with RecyclerView, Compose Text coloring, animating the text coloring, and predictive back gestures, a bunch of AndroidX releases, and a new episode of ADB!
Come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.
