Now in Android #69
Compose Camp, MAD Skills: Compose, Android Studio Dolphin, AndroidX releases, Jetpack Compose Tracing, Deep Links, and ADB.
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
Episode 69 Video and Podcast
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Compose Camp
We launched Compose Camp, a series of in-person and virtual sessions where you can learn how to build Android apps with Jetpack Compose alongside your peers. Compose Camp has two tracks: the beginner track caters to complete Android beginners including people that have no coding experience, and the experienced track is for Android developers who want to learn how to migrate to Compose and stop using XML. Learning with a Google developer community is a great way to connect with students and peers in your industry, tackle technical challenges together, and learn skills from each other that you can apply directly to your projects. Grab your “camping gear” and see how you can participate in a Compose Camp near you in the post!
Mad Skills: Compose
Speaking of Compose, Chris started a brand new MAD Skills series on Compose. This series is a great place to start to learn how to think and start building apps with Compose.
In the first episode you’ll learn how to change your thinking to coding with Compose. Building with Compose lets you focus on ‘what’, and not ‘how’, unlike the View system. In other words, you declare what you want your UI to contain, but you don’t tell it step-by-step how to do it. Learn more about how to think in Compose in this episode!
The next episode covers composable functions, the building blocks of Compose. You can create composable functions by using the @Composable annotation. Because composables are quick and easy to create, it is easy to organize your UI into a library of reusable components. Learn more about how to create Composable functions in this episode!
Android Studio: Dolphin
Android Studio Dolphin is here! In this post, Takeshi goes over the three key themes: Jetpack Compose, Wear OS, and development productivity. Exciting features include the Compose Animation Inspector, the Wear OS Emulator Pairing Assistant, and Gradle managed virtual devices. Learn about all the new features in the blog post or the video!
AndroidX releases 🚀
There has been a bunch of interesting stuff released in AndroidX recently. Notably, Annotation Version 1.5.0 went stable and was fully migrated to Kotlin sources, resulting in support for Kotlin-specific target use sites and other Kotlin-compatible annotation features. Activity Version 1.6.0 and Fragment Version 1.5.3 also went stable, DrawerLayout Version 1.2.0 is in alpha01, and RecyclerView Version 1.3.0 is in rc01.
Articles 📚
Ben covered Compose Composition Tracing, a new feature that allows showing Jetpack Compose composable functions in the Android Studio Flamingo system trace profiler. This feature gives you the low intrusiveness from system tracing, with method tracing levels of detail in composition. This is great for checking your Compose app’s performance and working out why your app may not be performing as you expect. Learn more about this feature in the post!
The Deep Links Crash Course continues with Summers writing an article on troubleshooting deep links. He goes over common issues that can occur with deep links and how to solve them.
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 189: Video Conference, Tor and Chet spoke with Marc, Toni, and Andrew from the Android Media team, where they work on video technologies and APIs like ExoPlayer. We talked about the evolution of ExoPlayer and platform media capabilities as well as ongoing and near-future features.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for this week with Compose Camp, MAD Skills: Compose, Android Studio Dolphin, AndroidX releases, Jetpack Compose Tracing, Deep Links, and a new episode of ADB.
Come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.
