Android Dev Summit. Highlights by Rosberry.

The Android Dev Summit is one of the largest conferences held by Google for Android Developers. I take it as the final part of Google I / O, which presents the latest achievements in the field of mobile development and Google services.

As always, Google efficiency was at a high level, including live broadcasting of all tracks and access to the summit materials.

Let’s take a look at highly significant topics.

The new version of our favourite Android Studio was released. Now we can use Jetpack Compose on our pet projects. However, Canary 1 still doesn’t look accomplished, so if you want to try the declarative UI style — Flutter is your choice.

View Binding replaces Kotlin Android Extensions View binding due to much criticism of the last one. It’s safe to say that in practice there are cases where it is impossible to use Kotlin Android Extensions.

Support for Java 8 Library desugaring in D8 and R8 was also added, it allows you to use the latest language features even for older versions of Android. A full-fledged editor for R8 / ProGuard, that has been inserted too, now has tips and syntax highlighting.

At this point you can also create Feature-on-feature dependencies for multi-module projects. So while downloading a certain part of the application as a separate module, it might be necessary to load other dependent modules.

We now don’t need to download the emulator separately, the developers have built it into the IDE. It’s been done mostly for beginner developers to enhance the work with the environment and the application at the start.

Layout Editor, Layout Inspector and Motion Layout Editor were highly improved. One of them is a preview of the animation on the layout. It will significantly save time when debugging the application.

These are the main things that you should pay attention in Android Studio 4.0 Canary 1. But keep in mind that for the large projects the current version will most likely be unstable, so you should think twice before updating.

Now let’s have a look at some myths that are usually taken as real facts and could prevent us from using certain features.

1. Kotlin slows down the launch of the application. If we’re talking about numbers — yes, it does. But in fact, this is not noticeable to the user.
2. Kotlin Getters / Setters could slow down the work of the app. That is not true. Everything is as fast as it can.
3. Lambda function could slow down the app too. At compile time the compiler optimizes syntax sugar in the code. Therefore better use lambdas where it’s appropriate.
4. Multidex slows down the application. It depends. The app launched on android 4.4 or lower won’t work well because of the outdated VM Dalvik. There is no difference if you have the number of dex files within a dozen in ART.
5. Gradle is slow. False. It only depends on the configuration you did and the complexity of the project which was inserted into. If your project has a billion files, then of course it is worth looking at Bazel or Buck and think twice about the architecture of the application.

As you can see, promotion of Kotlin and Gradle is going well. These tools certainly have weak sides, but nobody’s perfect.

CameraX now looks like a tool that you may like to use for taking pictures and filming. And I think the capabilities of the camera which is built into the app should not be worse than the system’s сamera application capabilities.

Wonder what’s going on with the Android Automotive? Nothing special. They showed Volvo with the latest Android version and the usability of music app and the navigator. In fact, the developers have their hands tied to develop a full-fledged application due to a number of restrictions that are imposed by the use of cars. A media application with listening content is the maximum you can expect.

There were a lot of discussions on the security of using apps and devices.

Android 10 has included the latest developments of security and data protection. They insist on using EncryptedSharedPreferences to protect user data, which integrates quite easily. It is also very easy to encrypt files using EncryptedFile.

Third-party apps have limited access to the files of your app.Now it’s possible to see external data using the provided link only. Scoped Storage was mentioned too, it will be available in the next Android release as required feature. The decision is reasonable because most of the applications are simply not ready for such an update.

We all remember the Associate Android Developer Certification. Now we have something bigger — Kotlin certification!

It could be useful in two cases:

• you are a beginner and want to test your skills
• it is important for your clients that the product is developed by a certified professional.

That’s it for what I wanted to share with you. For sure, there are still some open questions on application optimization, debugging, testing, and much more. Let’s leave it for a personal study on the publication. After all, the summit was successful, they showed a lot of what they promised on Google I/O and showed for the first time.