Now in Android #68
Privacy Sandbox, Modularization, Architecture, Performance, Deep links, Android Go edition, Android 13, Jetpack Glance, and more!
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
Episode 68 Video and Podcast
Now in Android is also offered as a video and podcast.
Privacy Sandbox developer preview 5 🔐
The Privacy Sandbox aims to develop new technologies that improve user privacy and enable effective, personalized advertising experiences for mobile apps. Developer Preview 5 was released, this version is a major milestone that will become the foundation for upcoming Privacy Sandbox Beta releases. Please keep giving us your feedback! See what’s changed in the blog post:
Guide to app modularization 🧩
The team just released new guidance on modularization. Guidance on this topic has been one of the top community requests and here it is! The guide is split into two parts. The overview page gives you a high level, theoretical overview of the matter and its benefits. The common modularization patterns page dives deep into practical examples in the context of modern Android architecture. Take a look at the guide announcement blog post to learn more about this.
More Architecture guidance 🏛
Apart from modularization, the team released more Architecture content!
If you need to make your app work offline, we got you covered. The new Build an offline-first app guide helps you design your app to properly handle reads and writes, and deal with synchronization and conflict resolution in a device with no Internet connectivity.
Another new guide is the State holders and UI state page in the UI layer docs. Not everything needs to be present in ViewModel classes. This page goes through the different types of state holders you can find in the UI layer and what their responsibilities are.
Lastly, if you want to learn all about Architecture and be up-to-date with our current best practices, check out the Architecture pathway, that got updated with all the videos of the Architecture MAD Skills series we produced early this year and the new docs.
Mad Skills: Performance ⚡️
The MAD Skills series has come to an end with the usual Live Q&A where Ben Weiss, Tomáš Mlynarič, Carmen Jackson, and Chris Craik answered your questions.
To wrap up the series, Ben wrote this blog post that contains a summary of all the videos! Don’t miss it out!
AndroidX releases 🚀
Since the previous episode, there are some AndroidX releases worth highlighting.
Core and core-ktx made it to 1.9.0 stable. This version improves compatibility with Android 13 adding parity between the accessibility framework and compat APIs, and some other additions. Other releases include new in beta Car app 1.3, and new in alpha Navigation 2.6 and Test Ui Automator 2.3.
See the rest of AndroidX releases in this link.
Articles 📚 and videos 🎥
The Developer Relations team wrote about how TikTok Enhanced its Video Social Experience on Android. They were able to significantly improve their overall performance by following Android’s performance guidance, and employing their deep understanding of development tools such as Android Gradle Plugin and Jetpack libraries. Read more here!
Sabs started a crash course series about deep links. The first part is an introduction to deep links with a blog post and a video. Get to know what a deep link is, go from URIs to app links, and more!
The second part goes over the different types of deep links. How to set them up, test them, and build the best user experience around them.
Marcel wrote about experimenting with Jetpack Glance that covers a standalone experimental repository to supplement Jetpack Glance with tools that are commonly required for development but not yet available. At the moment, it includes a composable to display RemoteViews inside your app (enabling Live Edit), a debug tool to view and interact with AppWidget snapshots embedded inside the app, and a Material3 Scaffold for AppWidgets.
Ben Trengove wrote about Debugging recomposition in Compose. Check it out because it also contains a screencast of Ben fixing a performance issue in Jetsnack, a Compose sample. For this, Ben also uses the layout inspector in Android Studio where you can see the recomposition and skip counts of composable functions.
Nikariha started another blog post series about optimizing for Android Go edition. The first part introduces Android Go edition, why you’d want to build for it, and some best practices based on experience building the Gboard and Camera from Google 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 188: Android 13, Chet, Romain, and Tor talk about some of their favorite new features and changes of the new version of Android, both for users and developers.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for this time, with a new developer preview of the privacy sandbox, modularization, offline-first, and state holder Architecture guidance, the end of the Performance MAD Skills series, AndroidX releases, articles on performance, deep links, Jetpack Glance, debugging recomposition, building for Android Go edition, and a new episode of ADB! Come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe!
