Android Developers Blog

Today is the last day to apply for the Android Developer Challenge ! And to spark your imagination, we wanted to take a look at one of the original Android Developer Challenge winners, from over 10 years ago. Meet Maurizio Leo : Maurizio and team have been working on Android for a while now. In fact, he was one of the winners of the original Android Developer Challenge, which launched with the start of Android over ten years ago. Their app , which won 3rd place worldwide at the time, has gone on to be downloaded over 30 million times! If you’ve got a great idea that can help users get things done, we want to hear! We’ll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition, in part from this amazing set of experts we’ve assembled. And once the app is ready, we’ll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. You can read more about all of the prizes here . There...

Posted by Jisha Abubaker , Product Manager Last month’s #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we’ll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don’t miss anything. We previously spotlighted Jetpack Compose , Kotlin and Android Studio , and today, we’re highlighting the rest of Android Jetpack , with the top three things you should know: #1: A number of new & updated Jetpack libraries ready to use: WorkManager 2.2 (Stable) has landed significant updates in the last releases with features like on-demand initialization improving app startup time when using WorkManager and improved testing support. Hear more of the new features and best practices. Room 2.2 (Stable) is packed with features you asked for too : pre-packaged databases, improved relationship support and now better support for Kotlin Flow as well. Check out the What’s new in Room session...

Just a little over a week left to finish your submission for the Android Developer Challenge, due December 2 ! Technology is enabling us to create a whole new era of helpful innovation by helping people get things done more quickly and surfacing patterns that would be difficult to detect using traditional methods. Ultimately, this helpful innovation is enabling us to live better, more productive, and safer lives. Earlier this week, we highlighted the type of helpful innovation ideas powered by machine learning which are the sort of examples we’re looking for, to help inspire you. Today, we wanted to share the names of the panel of experts we’ve assembled to help bring your projects to life as part of the Android Developer Challenge. These experts will be making the final decision on the 10 finalists of the Android Developer Challenge, and if you’re selected as one of those finalists, we plan to have you meet them when we bring you to Google HQ for a bootcamp next year: Dave Burke is ...

Last month, we kicked off the next Android Developer Challenge , and asked you to submit your ideas focused on helpful innovation, powered by on-device machine learning. But what exactly do we mean when we say helpful innovation? We’re glad you asked! We rounded up a few of Google’s on-device machine learning offerings, together with some great recent examples of this technology in action, to help inspire your submission. Don’t forget, submit your idea by December 2! Using machine learning to tackle Fall Armyworm Take Nazirini Siraji. When she and a team of developers noticed a crop-pest threatening the livelihood of Ugandan farmers, they taught themselves TensorFlow to combat this pest. They collected training data from nearby fields in the form of images. With TensorFlow, they re-trained a MobileNet , a technique known as transfer learning and then used the TensorFlow Converter to generate a TensorFlow Lite FlatBuffer file which they deployed in an Android app. With the app, a f...

Posted by Deepanshu Madan, Product Manager Last month’s #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we’ll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don’t miss anything. Earlier this week, we spotlighted Kotlin and Jetpack Compose , and today, we’re highlighting Android Studio , with the top three things you should know: #1: Support for Jetpack Compose For the best experience developing with Jetpack Compose , you can now use the latest version of Android Studio 4.0 in the canary channel , and benefit from smart editor features, such as New Project templates, code completion and the ability to immediately preview your Jetpack Compose UI. #2: What’s new in Android Studio session We covered both new features and successes of our quality initiative called Project Marble . On the quality aspect, we discuss improvements around hangs and latency, memory leak de...

Posted by David Winer, Kotlin Product Manager, @davidjwiner Last month’s #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we’ll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don’t miss anything. First up, we’re spotlighting Kotlin , with the top things you should know: #1: Kotlin momentum on Android Kotlin is at the heart of modern Android development — and we’ve been excited to see how quickly it has won over developers around the world. At Android Dev Summit we announced that nearly 60% of the top 1000 Android apps on the Play Store now use Kotlin, and we’re seeing more developers adopt it every day. Kotlin has helpful features like null safety, data classes, coroutines, and complete interoperability with the Java programming language. We’re doubling down on Kotlin with more Kotlin-first APIs even beyond AndroidX — we just released KTX extensions, including cor...

Posted by Anna-Chiara Bellini, @dr0nequeen Last month’s #AndroidDevSummit was jam-packed with announcements and technical news...so much that we wouldn’t be surprised if you missed something. So all this month, we’ll be diving into key areas from throughout the summit so you don’t miss anything. Earlier today, we spotlighted Kotlin and now we’re diving into Jetpack Compose , with the top three things you should know: #1: Jetpack Compose is available in Developer Preview! Jetpack Compose is Android’s modern toolkit for building native UI. It allows developers to write beautiful Android apps in an intuitive way, writing less code and accelerating development. It's powerful, because when writing code is a pleasure, you can focus on making your apps look beautiful and giving your users the best experience. At #AndroidDevSummit, we released the Developer Preview, to enable more feedback as we work towards bringing Jetpack Compose to beta next year. All you need to do is download the...

Posted by Stephanie Cuthbertson, Director, Product Management Modern Android Development today Perhaps as a consequence of Android's flexibility, we often get asked by developers what does the Android team recommend when it comes to building apps? You’ve told us: you love our openness..but you’d also love us to marry it with an opinion about the right way to do things. And, to make sure the right way is also the easiest way. And so today, at the Android Dev Summit , the team wanted to answer that question for you. We call our recommendation “modern Android development". Opinionated and powerful, for fast, easy development. Taking away everything that slows you down so you can focus on building incredible experiences. You can see it in the investments we’ve made like creating Android Studio and Jetpack. (Over 90% of our pro developers are using Android Studio today.) Kotlin and Compose are especially great recent examples. Kotlin is a modern, concise language -- something you a...

Posted by The Android team Developers like you have always played an important role in shaping the direction of Android, fueling the wave of Android innovation. It’s the reason that when we first launched the SDK for Android 10+ years ago, we simultaneously announced the Android Developer Challenge: a way to help reward model apps and show us what user problems you wanted to solve. As Android continues to push the boundaries into emerging areas like ML, 5G, foldables and more, we need your help to bring to life the consumer experiences that will define these new frontiers. So we’re bringing back the Android Developer Challenge and asking you to help us unlock new experiences on Android, and help inspire other developers around these emerging technologies. As we kick off this challenge, the first area we’ll be focusing on is On-Device Machine Learning. At Google, we’re big believers in how this new technology can open up a world of helpful innovation so you can get things done in ways ...

We’re less than 24 hours away from kicking off the 2019 Android Dev Summit , broadcasting live from the Google Events Center (MP7) in Sunnyvale, CA on October 23 & 24. We’ll be broadcasting the entire two days of the event live on YouTube , Twitter and on the Android Dev Summit website . Here’s what you need to know: The keynote, sessions, sandbox and more, kicking off at 10AM PDT The summit kicks off on October 23 at 10 a.m. PDT with a keynote, where you'll hear from Dave Burke, VP Engineering for Android, Stephanie Cuthbertson, Director of Product Management and others on the present and future of Android development. From there, we'll dive into two days of deep technical content from the Android engineering team, on topics such as Android platform, Android Studio, Android Jetpack, Kotlin, Google Play, and more. The full agenda is here so you can plan your summit experience. #AskAndroid your pressing questions! Tweet us your best questions using the hashtag #AskAndroid ...

Posted by The #AndroidDevSummit team In two weeks, we'll be welcoming Android developers from around the world at Android Dev Summit 2019, broadcasting live from the Google Events Center (MP7) in Sunnyvale, CA on October 23 & 24. Whether you’re joining us in person or via the livestream, we’ve got a great show planned for you; starting today, you can read more details about the keynote, sessions, codelabs, sandbox, the mobile app, and how online viewers can participate. The keynote, sessions, sandbox and more, kicking off at 10AM PDT The summit kicks off on October 23 at 10 a.m. PDT with a keynote, where you'll hear from Dave Burke, VP Engineering for Android, and others on the present and future of Android development. From there, we'll dive into two days of deep technical content from the Android engineering team, on topics such as Android platform, Android Studio, Android Jetpack, Kotlin, Google Play, and more. The full agenda is now available, so you can start to ...