Now in Android #70
Android Dev Summit, Pixel Watch, Text to Speech Upgrades, Compose Basics, Deep Links, and more.
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
Episode 70 Video and Podcast
Now in Android is also offered as a video and podcast.
Android Dev Summit ’22: Coming to you, online and around the world! ⛰️
Android Dev Summit is back, so join us online or in person — for the first time since 2019 — at locations around the world. We’ll be sharing the sessions live on YouTube in three tracks spread across three weeks:
- Modern Android Development, live on Oct 24 from the SF Bay Area
- Form Factors, live on Nov 9 from London
- Platform, live on Nov 14
You can apply to attend the SF Bay Area event or the London event in person now. At the end of each of our session tracks, we’ll be hosting a live #AskAndroid Q&A through Twitter or the YouTube livestream. Check out the ADS website for the latest updates on the event, or you can sign up for updates through the Android Developer newsletter.
The new Google Pixel Watch is here — start building for Wear OS! ⌚
We launched the Google Pixel Watch, powered by Wear OS 3.5, at the Made by Google event — the perfect device to showcase apps built with Compose for Wear OS. With Compose for Wear OS, the Tiles Material library, and the tools in Android Studio Dolphin, it’s now simpler and more efficient than ever to make apps for WearOS.
Todoist and Outdooractive rebuilt their app with Compose and you can read about their experiences. Outdooractive found that using Compose for Wear OS cut development time by 30% for their team, while Todoist has seen installation growth rates increase by 50% with the rebuilt-Compose version of their app. The blog post has more, including how to get started with Compose for Wear OS.
Listen to our major Text to Speech upgrades for 64 bit devices 💬
An upgrade to Speech Services by Google is rolling out to 64-bit Android devices via Google Play over the next few weeks, providing clearer, more natural voices. All 421 voices in 67 languages are being upgraded with a new voice model and synthesizer. The post includes more on this update, including demonstrations of some voice upgrades, along with guidance on how to use text to speech in your projects.
Mad Skills: Compose Basics 🎼
The new MAD Skills series on how to develop apps using Jetpack Compose continued with two new episodes.
The third episode dives into the toolkit of UI components that ships with Compose, including Material theming, scaffold support for common Material screen patterns, surfaces, layouts, and modifiers.
The fourth episode of the series covers how to accelerate your Compose development process with a dive into Android Studio tooling support, including live templates, gutter icons for drawables and colors, composable preview functions, multipreview, preview on device, live edits of literals, and the Layout Inspector.
For ongoing content, be sure to check out the MAD Skills playlist on YouTube, the articles on Medium, or this handy landing page that points to all of it.
Android Development Patterns: Deep Links 💠
The new Android Development Patterns Deep Links Crash Course continued with two new episodes.
Part 3 covers Troubleshooting your deep links, which uses command line tools and the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) to diagnose and debug common issues.
Part 4 explores Deep links for your business, covering the importance and benefits of implementing deep links for your app, your users, and your business, including success stories and how App Links provide an optimal experience for users.
Having trouble coming up with ideas on how to use Deep Links in your app? We also have a YouTube Short covering 30 ways to deep link into an app in 30 seconds.
Articles 📚
Articles of note include Ryan’s article on the six week intern project, Migrating the AOSP QuickSearchBox App to Kotlin. The article includes the methodology used in the migration, how they addressed required manual changes, and what the impact to APK size and build speed was.
Wojtek, Boris, and Xav covered how to Prepare your Android Project for Android Gradle plugin 8.0 API changes; the article specifically addresses migrating from the Transform APIs — which slow down builds and will be removed in 8.0 — to the Artifacts API and Instrumentation API.
Niharika released part two of the Optimize for Android Go : Lessons from Google apps blog series, covering strategies Google apps used to improve startup latency and optimize app size — things that will improve the user experience for any app.
Finally, Marcus detailed how changes in Google Play are Helping users discover apps for all their devices from their phone, including homepages for non-phone devices, a device search filter, and the ability to remotely install an app to another device.
AndroidX releases 🚀
Highlights of this interesting week in AndroidX include the first release candidate of Compose 1.3, the 1.0 release candidate of Compose Material 1.3, and the first alpha of a new TV library built using Compose. ShareTarget Version 1.2 includes a bugfix for Android 12+ devices, Activity Version 1.7 adds FullyDrawnReporter APIs, Exifinterface Version 1.3 was released, along with new alphas for Activity, AppCompat, AsyncLayoutInflater, and Tracing.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for this week with Android Dev Summit, the Pixel Watch, text to speech upgrades, two new episodes of Compose Basics, two new episodes of the Deep Links Crash Course, part two of our Android Go series, and AndroidX updates including the new Compose TV Library. Come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.
