Android Developers Blog

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef , Developer Relations Engineer On your marks...Get set… Wait a second! Save the date for the third week of the #AndroidDevChallenge ! On March 13th , compete with other developers in your time zone; the fastest Compose skills wins! We loved all the creative submissions of week #1 and #2, but now we’re looking for speed. Here’s your challenge: Week #3 - Speed round 🏎 Be the fastest to implement a set of designs provided by us. The designs will be posted here when the challenge starts. Submit your entry* as soon as you finish implementing the designs. We’ll post different designs at 3 different times on the 13th: APAC-friendly: opens at 9AM UTC+8 EMEA-friendly: opens at 9AM UTC Americas-friendly : opens at 9AM UTC-8 We’ll update this blog post at the beginning of each round with the link to the designs. Your UI must be fully built in Compose, and strictly match all the guidelines specified in the designs. To help you with the implementation, check out the Co...

Posted by The Jetpack Compose Team In less than 24 hours, we're giving you a backstage pass to Jetpack Compose , Android's modern toolkit for building native UIs, on #TheAndroidShow . Hosted by Kari Byron, you'll hear the latest on Jetpack Compose from the people who built it, plus a fireside interview with Android's Dave Burke. The show kicks off live at 9AM PT! Broadcasting live on February 24th at 9AM PT, you’ll be able to watch the show at goo.gle/TheAndroidShow , where you’ll also be able to find more information and links to all of the things we covered in the show. Or if you prefer, you can watch directly on YouTube or Twitter . There’s still time to ask your Jetpack Compose questions, use #TheAndroidShow Got a burning Jetpack Compose question? Want to learn about annotating a function type with @ Composable? Or how to add a static parameter to Composable functions at the compiler level? Tweet us your Jetpack Compose questions now, using #TheAndroidShow. We...

Posted by Dan Galpin , Developer Advocate This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid . For each of the #11WeeksOfAndroid, we’re diving into key areas so you don’t miss anything. This week, we spotlighted games, media, and 5G; here’s a look at what you should know. What's the buzz in Android 11? You can now control media applications from a dedicated space within the notification area while enabling features such as playback resumption and seamless transfer. New and updated 5g APIs help you unlock transformative new user experiences. Adds new support for key game tools and technologies. On top of that foundation, we're building tools to both improve your game developer experience and help you better characterize the performance of your game, services to help you expand the reach of your game to more devices and new audiences, and new and improved features to support your games' go-to-market with Google Play. Android 11 media We covered how to take adva...

Posted by Florina Muntenescu, Developer Advocate (@FMuntenescu) At Google I/O 2019 we announced that Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. Together with JetBrains, we also launched Kotlin/Everywhere - a global series of community led events focusing on the potential of using Kotlin everywhere; on Android, servers, web front-end and other platforms. Kotlin/Everywhere events took place from May through December and we want to thank everyone for getting involved 👨‍💻👩‍💻 30,000+ developers participated in-person at Kotlin/Everywhere events 🎥🍿 200,000 views of live-streams and event recordings like Kotlin/Everywhere Bengaluru , Minsk , Chicago , Buenos Aires and more. 📅 500+ events : from short evening meetups, half-day sessions, and full day events, to Kotlin/Everywhere tracks at larger events like DevFests, or even StudyJams that spanned several weeks. 🎤 ~30 speakers from Google and JetBrains gave ~70 talks at events around the world. 🌎 85+ countries/regi...

Posted by Aleks Haecky Advanced Android in Kotlin , developed by Google together with Udacity, is our newly-released, free, self-paced online course. In this course expert instructors from the Android team at Google will introduce you to some of the advanced features you can build into your Android apps. This course is intended for developers who have mastered the basics of building an Android app in Kotlin, and want to dive deeper into advanced functionality. To benefit most from this course, you need skills equivalent to what's taught in our Android Fundamentals Udacity or codelab courses. Advanced Android in Kotlin teaches you about notifications, graphics and animations on Android, using third-party authentication for login, and how to add maps to your apps. Learn how to create custom views that can look like anything you want, draw to a canvas, and have eye-catching animations. And, most importantly, you will learn how to properly test your apps! Here is a sample of app...

Posted by Lingfeng Yang, Android Studio team Developers often use the Android Emulator during their day-to-day development to quickly test the latest changes before they are being committed. In addition, developers are increasingly using the emulator in their continuous integration (CI) systems to run a larger suite of automated tests. To better support this use-case, we are open sourcing the Android Emulator Container Scripts and improving the developer experiences around two pain points: Deployability - finding and running the desired version of Android Emulator. Debuggability - tracking down bugs from remote instances of Android Emulator. Deployability Android supports a wide variety of hardware and software configurations, and the Android Emulator is no different. However, this wide variety can create confusion over environment configurations. How should developers obtain emulators and system images? What drivers are required? How do you run with or without CPU or GPU accelera...

Posted by Ian Stoba, Program Manager, Accessibility Engineering With billions of Android devices in use around the world and millions of apps available on the Play Store, it might seem difficult to drive change across the entire ecosystem, but the Accessibility Developer Infrastructure team is doing just that. Every time a developer uploads an APK or app bundle to the open or closed tracks, Play tests this upload on various device models running different versions of Android and generates a pre-launch report to inform the developer of issues. One year ago, the team added accessibility suggestions to the report based on industry best practices and Google’s own experience. These tests check for common issues that can make an app harder to use by people with disabilities. For example, they check that buttons are large enough to be comfortable for people to press, and that text has enough contrast with the background to be easier to read. Since launching in July 2018, more than 3.8 millio...