Android Developers Blog

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef , Developer Relations Engineer We introduced Tiles in 2019 , and since then, Tiles have become one of the most helpful and useful features on Wear OS by Google smartwatches. They are fast to access, convenient, and designed to provide users with swipeable access to the things they need to know and get done right from their wrist. This also gives users control over what information and actions they want to see. Today, we're excited to announce that the Jetpack Tiles library is in alpha. This library enables developers to create custom Tiles on Wear OS smartwatches. These custom Tiles will become available to users later this Spring when we roll out the corresponding Wear OS platform update. Tiles can be designed for many use cases, like tracking the user’s daily activity progress, quick-starting a workout, starting a recently played song, or sending a message to a favorite contact. While apps can be immersive, Tiles are fast-loading and focus on the user...

Posted by Erica Hanson , Global Program Manager, Google Developer Student Clubs Google Developer Student Clubs , a program of university based community groups for students interested in Google developer technologies, recently started hosting study groups called Android Study Jams . The goal? Learn Android app development through hands-on codelabs in an online curriculum provided by Google. There are two tracks: one for students who are new to programming, and one for those who already have experience. Interested in participating? Facilitator materials are available for anyone to host Android Study Jams in their community - take a look and get to building. Google Developer Student Clubs are dedicated to helping students learn programming together, among peers, in a fun and interactive setting. While over 50 thousand students from all over the world have participated in these Android workshops, we wanted to highlight the exciting work from groups in Indonesia, Turkey, and Nigeria. F...

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 Eric Bahna, Product Manager In December, we opened the Google Play Store for publishing new Android Auto apps to closed testing . Today, you can reach more drivers by publishing navigation, parking, and charging apps to open testing tracks in the Google Play Store. With open testing, there’s no limit to the number of users who can download your app and you don’t need to manage lists of email addresses. This is an important milestone that gets us closer to making these apps available to all users in production. Get started with the Android for Cars App Library and choose an open testing track in the Play Console. TomTom AmiGO, one of our early access partners To give you a peek at what’s ahead, we’re working on adding the library to Android Jetpack ! This will give you more consistency with other Jetpack APIs and visibility into new features. When the Jetpack library is ready, migrating your app from the existing library will be straightforward - change the namespace and twe...

Posted by Eric Bahna, Product Manager In August, we announced plans to expand Android Auto’s app ecosystem to enable new navigation, parking, and electric vehicle charging apps. We’ve been hard at work collaborating with our early access partners to test and refine the Android for Cars App Library. Today, we’re releasing the library into an open beta, for any developer to use. This means you’ll now be able to design, develop, and test your navigation, parking or charging app on Android Auto. We’re looking forward to enabling Google Play Store publishing for your beta apps in the coming months. Three of our early access partners: ChargePoint, SpotHero, and Sygic The design phase is the time to familiarize yourself with our design guidelines and app quality guidelines . Driver safety is core to our mission and we want to help you optimize your app for the car. When it comes time to build your app, our new library will hopefully make development easy. Get started with the...

Posted by Scott Swarthout, Product Manager Today, we’re excited to release the stable version of Android Studio 4.1 , with a set of features addressing common editing, debugging, and optimization use cases. A major theme for this release was helping you be more productive while using Android Jetpack libraries, Android’s suite of libraries to help developers follow best practices and write code faster. Based on your feedback we made a number of improvements to the code editing experience with IDE integrations for popular Android libraries. Some highlights of Android Studio 4.1 include a new Database Inspector for querying your app’s database, support for navigating projects that use Dagger or Hilt for dependency injection, and better support for on-device machine learning with support for TensorFlow Lite models in Android projects. We’ve also made updates to Apply Changes to make deployment faster. Based on your feedback, we’ve made several changes to help game developers with ...

This is the final blog post for #11WeeksOfAndroid . Thank you for joining us over the past 11 weeks as we dove into key areas of Android development. In case you missed it, here’s a recap of everything we talked about during each week: Week 1 - People and identity Discover how to implement the conversation shortcut and bubbles with ‘ conversation notifications ’. Also, learn more about conversation additions and other System UI news, and discover the people and conversations developer documentation here . Finally, you can also listen to the Android Backstage podcast where the System UI team is interviewed on people and bubbles . To tackle user and developer complexity that makes identity a challenge for developers, we've been working on One Tap and Block Store, part of our new Google Identity Services Library. If you’re interested in learning more about Identity, we published the video “ in Identity on Android: what’s new in sign-in ,” where Vishal explains the new libraries ...

Posted by Chris Banes & Nick Butcher This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid . Each week we’re diving into a key area of Android so you don’t miss anything. This week, we spotlighted people & identity; here’s a look at what you should know. The big news: Jetpack Compose Alpha This week we released the first alpha of Jetpack Compose 🎉, Android’s modern UI toolkit with native access to the platform APIs. Compose combines the power of Kotlin with the reactive programming model to make it easier and faster to build UI. We want your feedback to help us build the APIs that you need in your apps, so now is the time to try it out. To get you up to speed with Compose, this week we’ve released 4 new codelabs , 7 new samples , new documentation and a podcast from the Compose team. If you prefer videos; we’ve got you covered... To understand the reactive mindset and how to think about building apps with Compose, check out ‘Thinking in Compose’: Learn how J...

Posted by Product Leads for Android TV, Android for cars, Wear OS, and Chrome OS This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid . Each week we’re diving into a key area of Android so you don’t miss anything. This week, we spotlighted Android Beyond Phones; here’s a look at what you should know. With Android, people can experience the apps and services that they love across many devices & surfaces. Beyond phones, Android offers distinct yet familiar experiences on devices of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the smallest smartwatch screens, to larger displays on foldables and Chromebooks, to in-car entertainment systems, and all the way up to the largest television screens. For the past 4 days, we featured a daily deep dive into each of these exciting form factors that are providing developers with new and growing ways to engage people. Read on for a recap. Android TV We kicked off the week with Android TV , which is now partnering with 7 of the top 10 OEMs and ...