Android Developers Blog

Posted by Anna-Chiara Bellini , Product Manager, Nick Butcher , Developer Relations Today, we’re launching the beta release of Jetpack Compose , our new UI toolkit designed to make it faster and easier to build native apps across all Android platforms. Compose offers modern, declarative Kotlin APIs, helping you build beautiful, responsive apps with way less code. Built to integrate with existing Android apps and Jetpack libraries, you can adopt Compose at your own pace by combining Android Views and Compose. With this beta release, Compose is API complete and has all the features you need to build production-ready apps. Beta also means API stable, so we won’t change or remove APIs. Now is a great time to start learning Compose and begin planning for how you will use it in an upcoming project or feature once it reaches 1.0 later this year. What's In Beta Our team has been developing Compose in the open with feedback and participation from the community. Since open sourcing deve...

Posted by Karen Ng , Director, Product Management Today, we’re releasing the alpha of Jetpack Compose , our modern UI toolkit designed to help you quickly and easily build beautiful apps across all Android platforms, with native access to the platform APIs. Bring your app to life with dramatically less code, interactive tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs. No matter where you’re working from -- whether it’s your kitchen table or an office, we know you need a programming language, an IDE and a powerful UI framework that can save you time and reduce how much code you need to write. So we built Jetpack Compose to make you (and us!) more productive with building UI. We started with Android Jetpack — taking the hardest, most common developer problems on Android and creating a suite of libraries that ensure high quality apps that work across all versions of the platform. Today, 84% of the top 10,000 apps in the Play store are using a Jetpack library. Then we heard how developers love Kotlin,...

Posted by Diana Wong, Product Manager, Android Jetpack This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid . For each of the #11WeeksOfAndroid , we’re diving into a key area so you don’t miss anything.This week, we spotlighted Jetpack ; here’s a look at what you should know. The big news In 2018, we launched Android Jetpack as a suite of libraries to help developers follow best practices, reduce boilerplate code, and write code that works consistently across Android versions and devices. We are excited about the growth we’ve seen and the incredible feedback that developers like you have shared with us. 47% of the top 1000 apps use 2 or more Jetpack libraries, not including core libraries like AppCompat or Lifecycle. Our work over the past year has been about making the basics easy for Android developers, so that you can focus on the code you care about. We have released many updates to our existing libraries as well as new libraries to help make building high-quality apps ...

Posted by Florina Muntenescu , Android Developer Advocate Getting on the same page with Paging 3 The Paging library enables you to load large sets of data gradually and gracefully, reducing network usage and system resources. You told us that the Paging 2.0 API was not enough - that you wanted easier error handling, more flexibility to implement list transformations like map or filter , and support for list separators, headers, and footers. So we launched Paging 3.0 (now in alpha02), a complete rewrite of the library using Kotlin coroutines (still supporting Java users) and offering the features you asked for. Paging 3 highlights The Paging 3 API provides support for common functionality that you would otherwise need to implement yourself when loading data in pages: Keeps track of the keys to be used for retrieving the next and previous page. Automatically requests the correct next page when the user scrolls to the end of the loaded data. Ensures that multiple requests aren’t triggere...

Posted by Karen Ng , Group Product Manager and Jisha Abubaker , Product Manager, Android Last year, we launched Android Jetpack, a collection of software components designed to accelerate Android development and make writing high-quality apps easier. Jetpack was built with you in mind -- to take the hardest, most common developer problems on Android and make your lives easier. Jetpack has seen incredible adoption and momentum. Today, 80% of the top 1,000 apps in the Play store are using Jetpack. We’ve also heard feedback from so many of you across our early access developer programs and user studies, as well as Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Slack, that has helped shape these APIs. Very humbly, thank you. What’s New in Jetpack Today, we are excited to share with you 11 Jetpack libraries that can be used in development now and an early-development, open-source project called Jetpack Compose to simplify UI development. Now in Alpha CameraX We've heard from many of you that developin...

Posted by Chet Haase It's great to be in our backyard again for Google I/O to connect with Android’s developers around the world. The 7,200 attendees at Shoreline Amphitheatre, millions of viewers on the livestream , and thousand of developers at local I/O Extended events across 80+ countries heard about our efforts to make the lives of developers easier. Today at Google I/O, we talked about two big themes; helping our developers become more productive and strengthening user privacy and security in the platform. Let's take a closer look at the major developer news at I/O so far: Developer Productivity This year, we focused on a simple idea - we want to save you time every today. By making everything you use even better. Kotlin Two years ago, we announced Kotlin was a supported language for Android. Our top developers loved it already, and since then, it’s amazing how fast it’s grown. Over 50% of professional Android developers now use Kotlin, it’s been one of the most-lov...

Posted by Ian Lake, Software Engineering Lead & Jisha Abubaker, Product Manager Cohesive tooling and guidance for implementing predictable in-app navigation Today we're happy to announce the stable release of the Android Jetpack Navigation component. The Jetpack Navigation component's suite of libraries , tooling and guidance provides a robust, complete navigation framework, freeing you from the challenges of implementing navigation yourself and giving you certainty that all edge cases are handled correctly. With the Jetpack Navigation component you can: Handle basic user actions like Up & Back buttons so that they work consistently across devices and screens. Allow users to land on any part of your app via deep links and build consistent and predictable navigation within your app. Improve type safety of arguments passed from one screen to another, decreasing the chances of runtime crashes as users navigate in your app. Add navigation experiences like navigation d...

Posted by Sumir Kataria, Software Engineering Lead & Jisha Abubaker, Product Manager Simplify how you manage background work with WorkManager Today, we're happy to announce the release of Android Jetpack WorkManager 1.0 Stable. We want to thank so many of you in our dev community who have given us feedback and logged bugs along the way - we've gotten here thanks to your help! When we looked at the top problems faced by developers, we saw that doing background processing reliably and in a battery-friendly manner was a huge challenge. This meant that periodically fetching fresh content or uploading your logs was complex. Different versions of Android provided different tools for the job, each with their own API quirks. For example, listening for network or storage availability and automatically retrying your tasks involved a lot of work. Our answer to these challenges was WorkManager. We introduced a preview of the Android Jetpack WorkManager library at Google I/O 2018 a...