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 Florina Muntenescu , Developer Relations Engineer 3...2...1… Time for another challenge! Welcome to the second week of the #AndroidDevChallenge ! We loved seeing your creative submissions in week #1 so we can’t wait to see what you’ll build in week #2. Here’s your challenge: Week #2 - Countdown timer ⏲️ Create a working, single screen countdown timer. You have until March 9th, 23:59 PST to submit your entry . 1 Your UI must be fully built in Compose. To help you with the implementation, check out the Compose documentation on state and animation . For some hands-on learning try out the Compose pathway , with codelabs covering several topics useful for completing this challenge. Your solution must be implemented in a GitHub repository. Make a copy of this Github repository template and follow the instructions in the README. The template contains a basic Hello World! in Compose and a continuous integration setup. This week’s prize: a Compose poster pack! Our second week...

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 Chet Haase , Developer Relations Engineer We recently finished another series of MAD Skills videos - this time on Motion Layout. We covered ways in which you can use the API and the design tool to create rich, custom, and complex animations for your users. Check out the episodes below to increase your knowledge and skills in different areas of the Motion Layout API and design tool. And watch the live Q&A episode, featuring engineers on the Motion Layout and Developer Relations teams. Episode 1 - ConstraintSet Animations This video explores how ConstraintSets are used to define different states of your UI that you animate between. Along the way, Sean shows how to use Motion Editor in Android Studio to create and edit these transitions. Episode 2 - Keyframes This episode shows how to use Keyframes in a MotionLayout animation to customize the animation by altering the values of various properties over time. For example, you can use keyframes to change the path an objec...

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering Every day, Android apps help billions of people work, play, communicate, and create on a wide range of devices from phones and laptops to tablets, TVs, and cars. As more people come to rely on the experiences you build, their expectations can rise just as fast. It’s one of the reasons we share Android releases with you early: your feedback helps us build a better platform for your apps and all of the people who use them. Today, we’re releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 12, the next version of Android, for your testing and feedback. With each version, we’re working to make the OS smarter, easier to use, and better performing, with privacy and security at the core. In Android 12 we’re also working to give you new tools for building great experiences for users. Starting with things like compatible media transcoding, which helps your app to work with the latest video formats if you don’t already support them, and easier copy/paste of ri...

We just wrapped up another series of MAD Skills videos and articles - this time on Kotlin and Jetpack. We covered different ways in which we made Android code more expressive and concise, safer, and easy to run asynchronous code with Kotlin. Check out the episodes below to level up your Kotlin and Jetpack knowledge! Each episode covers a specific set of APIs, talking both about how to use the APIs but also showing how APIs work under the hood. All the episodes have accompanying blog posts and most of them link to either a sample or a codelab to make it easier to follow and dig deeper into the content. We also had a live Q&A featuring Jetpack and Kotlin engineers. Episode 1 - Using KTX libraries In this episode we looked at how you can make your Android and Jetpack coding easy, pleasant and Kotlin-idiomatic with Jetpack KTX extensions . Currently, more than 20 libraries have a KTX version. This episode covers some of the most important ones: core-ktx that provides...

Posted by Christopher Katsaros; Your #MADscore tabulator We’ve been talking to you a lot recently about modern Android development (MAD), through the MAD Skills series . Now it’s time to see: what’s your MAD score? From how many Jetpack libraries you’re using to what percent of your app is coded in Kotlin, today we’re launching a MAD scorecard that shows just how modern an Android developer you are. Your MAD scorecard uses Android Studio to tell you interesting things like how much size savings your app is seeing through the Android App Bundle. It spotlights each of the key MAD technologies, including specific Jetpack libraries and Kotlin features you could be using. You’ll even get a special MAD character based on your MADest skill (who knows, you just might be a MAD scientist…). Here’s how to get your scorecard You can get a personalized look into your MAD score through a new Android Studio plugin, here’s how to get and share your scorecard: Step 1 - Install the plugin: Throug...

Posted by Nick Rout It’s a wrap_content! The third topic in the MAD Skills series of videos and articles on Modern Android Development is complete. This time around we covered Material Design Components (a.k.a MDC). This library provides the Material Components as Android widgets and makes it easy to implement design patterns seen on material.io, such as Material Theming, Dark Theme, and Motion. Check out the episodes and links below to see what we covered. We designed these videos to closely follow our recent series of MDC articles as well as existing sample apps and codelabs, so you’ve got a variety of ways to engage with the content. We also had a Q&A episode featuring engineers from the MDC team! Episode 1: Why use MDC? The first episode by Nick Butcher is an overview video of this entire MAD Skills series, including why we recommend MDC, then deep-dives on Material Theming, Dark Theme and Motion. It also covers MDC interop with Jetpack Compose and updates to Android S...