Now in Android #73
Android Dev Summit: Platform track, Health Connect, Now in Android on Google Play, user choice billing, lazy layouts
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
Episode 73 Video and Podcast
Now in Android is also offered as a video and podcast.
Android Dev Summit ’22 Concludes with Platform 🚉
The third day of Android Developer Summit live streamed, focusing on developer features and guidance around Android 13. Check out the full YouTube playlist to learn more about how your apps can help make Android more private, secure, and personal along with how they can stand out by taking advantage of new features and best practices.
Leading Health and Fitness Apps Roll Out Health Connect Integrations 🏃🚴🏊
Over 10 health, fitness and wellness apps rolled out integrations with the Health Connect platform including early adopters of Health Connect like MyFitnessPal, Oura and Peloton. Health Connect is a platform that we developed with Samsung to enable users to allow apps to securely share health and fitness data with each other. The Health Connect (Beta) app gives users a central place to manage their privacy settings with granular controls to see which apps have access to data at any given time.
Enabling health and fitness apps to talk to each other allows apps to provide users with better, more holistic health insights. Instead of having to utilize different APIs to talk to each app, with Health Connect, building an integration with a new app is as simple as reading in new data. For example, Android users will now be able to sync and get credit for their Peloton workouts in apps like Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers and Lifesum.
Health Connect provides a standardized data schema which supports 40+ data types across 6 categories covering exercises to sleep tracking to vital signs, and the post has links to the information to help your app use Health Connect to develop richer insights for your users.
We also released a playlist of videos around developing with the Health Connect platform, including an Introduction to Health Connect, Managing permissions in Health Connect, and Reading and writing in Health Connect.
Now in Android is live on Google Play ⏰
The Now in Android app is live on Google Play It is a fully-functional open-source Android app built entirely with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose that showcases best practices, opinionated designs, and solutions to complex real-world problems. Like this blog, it helps you keep up to date with Android development by providing regular news updates. You can find the corresponding source code at github.com/android/nowinandroid.
Continuing our Commitment to User Choice Billing 💵💳
We announced that, based on the positive response and initial feedback from developers and users, we are expanding the user choice billing pilot to users in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa, joining Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, and the European Economic Area.
In September we opened participation in the pilot to all developers of non-gaming apps, providing more detail about eligibility requirements — including interim UX guidelines. The post has more detail, including information on the Spotify roll-out of an initial test implementation of user choice billing in select countries.
Videos 📹
The videos from the Android Platform track have dropped, beginning with my Top 3 picks from the Platform track at ADS ’22. How to Migrate Your Apps to Android 13 provides an overview of what it takes to get your app working on Android 13, targeting SDK version 33, and how to take advantage of some new stuff Android 13 has to offer. It also calls out to many of the other sessions, making it a good place to start your Android 13 journey.
Platform: Privacy and Security
Under Privacy and Security in Android 13, we also cover what’s Next up on the Privacy Sandbox, Everything about storage on Android, Demystifying attestation, and how to Foster user trust by adopting privacy-respecting permission workflows.
Platform: Personalization
Under personalization, we teach Building for a multilingual world, Building modern Android app widgets, Designing a high quality app with the latest Android features, and Building accessibility support for Compose.
Platform: Capabilities and More
Sessions that walk you through the updated capabilities of the platform, including support for the latest media and communications standards and more include Presenting a high-quality media experience for all users, Improving your social experience quality with Android Camera, how to handle Capture, Playback, and Sharing 10BIT Video (HDR Video), Supporting BLE Audio in your voice communication applications, an Introduction to Ultrawide-band on Android, the latest in Android Graphics, how to start Syncing data with Health Connect, and implementing Hardware acceleration for on-device Machine Learning. We even shared Migrating to Billing Library 5 and what it takes to make subscriptions more flexible on Google Play.
Pixel 7 is the first 64-bit only Android device, and Keep your app from failing in a 64-bit only world covers how to make sure your app works properly on it and upcoming 64-bit only devices.
We finished the Platform track with the Platform #AskAndroid session, where we took your questions live with experts that build and support the Android platform.
ADB Podcast Episodes🎙
Episode 191 of Android Developers Backstage was recorded from our London office studio. Rebecca joined Chet as a guest host, and talked with Andrei, Matvei, and Andrey from the Jetpack Compose engineering team about layouts, especially the lazy ones, which are the Compose equivalent of RecyclerView.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for this week with Android Dev Summit and its Platform track, Health Connect, Now in Android on Google Play, user choice billing, lazy layouts, and more! Come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.
