The Android Show | Liveblog and Updates for Developers and Engineers
The Latest Announcements from the Android Team at The Android Show on Oct 19, 2023
Introduction
The Android Show was held on October 19 at 10 AM PST and livestreamed at the link below
This liveblog of The Android Show summarizes the key announcements at The Android Show.
Google does not seem to be hosting an Android Dev Summit in 2023
The theme for The Android Show 2023 is
Faster and easier to build excellent apps across devices
The Android Show was divided into 3 parts
- Developer Productivity — How generativeAI and Android StudioBot helps make development faster and easier
- Across Devices — Build apps across devices including wearables and large screens
- Development of Premium Apps — Development of Premium Apps with Android 14 and a conversation with Dave Burke
Finally, there are going to be demos and a fireside chat with the Android team in the Bay Area.
Developer Productivity
In this segment, Google Developer Expert Annyce Davis and Googler Jamal Eason discuss #StudioBot and how Generative AI can assist you in your productivity
Android Studio Bot
Earlier this year, at Google IO, Jamal Eason, Director of Product Management at Google, made the announcement that Studio Bot (the AI powered coding assistant) would be integrated into Android Studio at the Google IO 2023 Keynote.
It seems that Android Studio Bot is still highly experimental at this stage.
Code Privacy
Jamal Eason said that by default, Studio doesn’t share the source code. He mentioned there is a custom way to opt in to sharing using a .AI / .aiexclude file.
Annyce Davis handed it back to the Googlers in the GooglePlex.
Across Devices
Support for Big and Small Form Factors
Since there is a wide variety of potential form factors and window size classes that run Android, Florina Muntenescu and Adarsh Fernando cover performance improvements and screenshot testing support.
Florina did a demo of a benchmark test she ran where updating Jetpack Compose to the latest BOM version (2023.10.00 from 2023.06.00) resulted in 3–5 millisecond improvements just by updating to the latest Compose BOM version.
Screenshot Tests
Adarsh Fernando introduced a gradle task to screenshot and diff the Jetpack Compose previews of all the screens in the app.
./gradlew core:designsystem:previewRenderOptimizedDemoDebugAndroidTestThe above screenshot test can compare and diff between the screenshots of the previews across gradle builds and provide a report, helping one flag and catch UI errors.
The test results will show the diff in the report and the tests run in the JVM. This will be rolled out as an AGP plugin and one can manage and review screenshot tests from the IDE.
Additional improvements for developers include —
- For Kotlin builds, one can now use the Kotlin K2 Compiler.
- Dagger / Hilt KSP Support in Alpha
- Perfetto enables support for tracing at app startup
- Kotlin Multi Platform Support for Paging in Alpha
- Emoji Picker — new library
Threads built with Jetpack Compose
90% of Threads was built with Jetpack Compose.
The team chatted with software engineer, Richard Zadorozny, on how the Threads team streamlined their build process to ship in only 5 months.
Pixel Watch 2 and Wear OS 4
On October 4, Google introduced the Pixel Watch 2. There is now Wear OS updates for developers documented at
https://developer.android.com/wear/gallery
Device Streaming
The latest version of Android Studio includes device streaming, powered by Firebase, which is free to use while it is in preview.
More information on registering for device streaming can be found here
Drag And Drop
Drag and Drop functionality within apps and between apps also enables new user experiences for fold and tablet devices as seen here
Expandables
The Expandables API for Wear has several improvements
Tablets
Samsung offers a few resources for developers to test apps on various devices including
Android SDK Upgrade Assistant
One may select an upgrade path by going to
Tools -> Android SDK Upgrade Assistant
