Now in Android #75
Android Studio Electric Eel, Architecture, Kotlin Multiplatform, WearOS, CameraX, Stylus, and more.
Welcome to 2023 and a new episode of Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
Episode 75 Video and Podcast
Now in Android is also offered as a video and podcast.
Android Studio Electric Eel is stable ⚡
This release includes updates and new features that cover across design, build & dependencies, emulators & devices, and IntelliJ.
This version brings improvements to the Compose Preview that now updates automatically, the layout inspector that now displays recomposition counts, visual XML linting for Views, sync performance with parallel project imports, SDK Index integration, a new logcat, resizable emulators, physical devices mirroring, and more!
For more information check out the blog post or the video, and download the latest stable version today to try it out for yourself!
AndroidX releases 🚀
Since the previous episode, there have been some AndroidX releases worth highlighting.
Graduated to stable, we can find AppCompat 1.6.0 that primarily supports Android 13 including per-language preferences and predictive back, and Room 2.5.0 that got its runtime converted from Java to Kotlin and new features such as the Upsert annotation and room-paging support for RxJava and Guava.
The Lifecycle’s new 2.6.0-alpha04 version removes the experimental annotation from the collectAsStateWithLifecycle API and deprecates the pausing dispatcher and launchWhenX APIs.
As new libraries, we can find the androidx.credentials library that helps users sign into apps, using their stored credentials including passwords and passkeys. Also new privacy sandbox libraries such as the adservices one that enables integration with Privacy Preserving APIs, and sdkruntime that contains components for building and loading Runtime enabled SDKs on old versions of Android Platform.
Articles 📚
Don Turner wrote about adding a domain layer to an app that covers how the team added a domain layer to the Now in Android app for improved readability, scalability and portability.
Anton Hansson wrote about extending the Android SDK that covers the Extension SDK framework that enables the team to introduce new functionality outside of major API level releases allowing faster innovations such as the new photo picker, and provide backward compatibility.
chiara chiappini wrote about the ease the development of media apps for Wear OS with the media toolkit you’ll learn how to bring your media app to Wear OS smartwatches with the help of the newly released Wear media toolkit.
Mozart Louis wrote the first part of a HDR series, migrating from TextureView to SurfaceView. Migrating to the preferred SurfaceView enables HDR playback on supported devices.
Cedric Ferry wrote about the Stylus low latency. The post covers two new libraries (low latency graphics and motion prediction) that aim to reduce the processing time between stylus input and screen rendering, explores how these libraries work, and how you can implement a best-in-class stylus experience in your app.
Videos 🎥
If you want to make your app grow, you should watch these two videos, optimize paywall conversion, and engage with push notifications, to learn about those topics and improve your app.
Donovan recorded a video about CameraX concepts to introduce you to its functionality through 4 use cases: Preview, ImageCapture, VideoCapture, and ImageAnalysis.
Chris Shmerling recorded an in-depth walkthrough of a sample app using the FLEDGE API, a component of the Privacy Sandbox on Android.
Erin recorded an introduction to the Attribution Reporting API that is designed to provide improved user privacy by removing reliance on cross-party user identifiers, and to support key use cases for attribution and conversion measurement. The video walks you through a sample implementation of the Attribution Reporting API on Android.
ADB Podcast Episodes🎙
In Episode 193: Kotlin, James Ward joins Chet Haase, Tor Norbye, and Romain Guy to talk about Kotlin Multiplatform (both KMP and KMM) and what’s coming for Kotlin in 2023, especially the new K2 frontend.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for the first Now in Android episode of 2023 with a new version of Android Studio stable, AndroidX releases, articles about the domain layer, extending the Android SDK, Wear OS, HDR and the stylus, videos about app growth, CameraX and the Attribution Reporting API, a new episode of the Android Developers Backstage, and more!
Come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.
