Android Developers Blog

Posted by Kat Kuan , Developer Advocate, Android We strive to make Android development content accessible to all, so that anyone can become an Android developer. Over the years, millions of students at all different levels have consumed our learning content and worked through courses and codelabs to advance their skills. We continue to update and release new content as the ever-changing industry continues to evolve. As demand for skilled Android developers increases in the job marketplace, there is an even greater need for educators to train the next generation of Android developers. That is why we created these resources to help support and empower educators. New Android Development with Kotlin instructor-led curriculum Today we’re announcing the launch of our new instructor-led curriculum for Android Development with Kotlin . This is for classroom learning (virtual or in-person) with an instructor delivering lectures on important Android concepts, and students receiving hands-on pra...

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 Wojtek Kaliciński, Developer Advocate, Android When we adopted Kotlin as a supported language on Android, and then shifted to a Kotlin-first approach, one of the main drivers was the excitement and adoption from the developer community. As Kotlin has grown, we’ve seen continued investment in the language from JetBrains (Kotlin's creators), the open source community, and increasingly our own teams at Google. Today we are excited to share the news about the Kotlin 1.4 release, the next milestone in the evolution of Kotlin, which contains new language features, improved compilers and tools. Below you'll find a brief rundown of some exciting new features in this release. You can read more about Kotlin 1.4 in the official announcement . New language features New language features introduced in Kotlin 1.4 improve the ergonomics of writing Kotlin code. Here's just one example: SAM conversions for Kotlin interfaces Previously, only functional interfaces (i.e. having jus...

Posted by David Winer , Product Manager 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 languages ; here’s a look at what you should know. Modern Android development starts with outstanding language support. Together, Kotlin, the Java programming language, and C++ form the foundation for Android’s APIs and the tools you use every day for app development. This week we dove into all of the latest news across Android’s three core languages: from Kotlin coroutines to Android 11’s new Java APIs to better tools for native development, there’s a lot packed into the latest release. Kotlin and coroutines Kotlin is at the core of Android’s modern, opinionated APIs. We hear from Android developers around the world that they love Kotlin for how expressive it is, how it helps you write higher quality apps, and how easy it is to start using in your existing Java codebase. More th...

The Google Home app helps set up, manage, and control your Google Home, Google Nest, and Chromecast devices—plus thousands of connected home products like lights, cameras, thermostats, and more. The engineering team behind the Google Home app benefits from using Kotlin and Android Jetpack libraries to boost engineering productivity and developer happiness. What they did: The Google Home team decided to incorporate Kotlin into their codebase to make programming more productive and to enable the usage of modern language features like var/val, smart casts, coroutines, and more. As of June 2020, about 30% of the code base is written in Kotlin , and Kotlin development is encouraged for all new features. The team also adopted Jetpack libraries to improve developer velocity, decrease the need for boilerplate code maintenance, and reduce the necessary amount of code. Jetpack libraries also helped make their code more testable, since there are clearer functional boundaries and APIs. Results:...

Posted by Kat Kuan , Developer Advocate, Android Many people today are considering career paths that enable them to work remotely. App development allows for that style of work. For people who want a new opportunity, it’s possible to start learning Android today, even without prior programming experience. In 2016, we released our Android Basics curriculum , which assumes no programming experience, and the response has been tremendous. Hundreds of thousands of students have been learning Android development and programming concepts simultaneously as they build apps. Since then, there have been big platform changes with four major releases of Android and support added for the Kotlin programming language. We also introduced Jetpack, a suite of libraries that make it easier to build better apps with less code. With all these new updates, it’s time to release the next generation of training content for beginners. Today we’re announcing the launch of Android Basics in Kotlin , a new online c...

Posted by David Winer , Kotlin Product Manager Last May at Google I/O, we announced that Android was going Kotlin first, and now over 60% of the top 1000 Android apps use Kotlin. One feature we love about Kotlin is that nullability is baked into its type system — when declaring a reference, you say upfront whether it can hold null values . In this post, we’ll look at how the Android 11 SDK does more to expose nullability information in its APIs and show how you can prepare your Kotlin code for it. How does nullability in Kotlin work? When writing code in Kotlin, you can use the question mark operator to indicate nullability: font-family: sans-serif; color: #555; font-weight: 500; ">KOTLIN var x: Int = 1 x = null // compilation error var y: Int? = 1 y = null // okay This aspect of Kotlin makes your code safer — if you later call a method or try to access a property on a non-null variable like x , you know you’re not risking a null pointer exception. We hear over an...

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 David Winer , Kotlin Product Manager When we announced Kotlin as a supported language for Android, there was a tremendous amount of excitement among developers. Since then, there has been a steady increase in the number of developers using Kotlin. Today, we’re proud to say nearly 60% of the top 1,000 Android apps contain Kotlin code , with more and more Android developers introducing safer and more concise code using Kotlin. During this year’s I/O, we announced that Android development will be Kotlin-first, and we’ve stood by that commitment. This is one of the reasons why Android is the gold partner for this year’s KotlinConf . Seamless Kotlin on Android In 2019, we focused on making programming in Kotlin on Android a seamless experience, with modern Kotlin-first APIs across the Android platform. Earlier this year, we launched a developer preview of Jetpack Compose , a modern UI toolkit for Android built using a Kotlin domain-specific language (DSL). We also incorporated c...

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 Wojtek Kaliciński, Developer Advocate, Android Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson announces support for Kotlin during the Developer Keynote at I/O 2017. Today at OSCON (the O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference ), Kotlin was awarded the Open Source Award for Breakout Project of the Year. There is no doubt to us why Kotlin received this award: it’s a fast moving (but thoughtfully developed) programming language that lets you write better code, faster. It’s great to see Kotlin continue to receive the sort of recognition as Breakout Project of the Year, building on other awards like #1 fastest growing language on Github . We’re big fans of Kotlin, and we’ve heard that you are too – feedback from you is in part why we announced support for the language over two years ago. This meant bundling the Kotlin plugin in Android Studio, along with promising to support Kotlin-built apps going forward. But there was a long way to go for many teams at Google to provide a first class experie...

Posted by Posted by Florina Muntenescu & Wojtek Kaliciński, Developer Advocates, Android Last week at Google I/O, we announced a big step: Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. It’s a language that many of you already love: over 50% of professional Android developers now use Kotlin, and it’s the fastest-growing language on GitHub. As part of this announcement, many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. So if you’re starting a new project, you should try writing it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often means much less code for you–less code to type, test, and maintain. To help you dive deeper into Kotlin, we’re happy to announce a new program we’re launching together with JetBrains: Kotlin/Everywhere , a series of community-driven events focussing on the potential of Kotlin on all platforms. We are aiming to help learn the essentials and best practices of using Kotlin everywhere, be it for Android, back-end, front-end and other platfo...

Posted by Dan Galpin Developing Android Apps with Kotlin , developed by Google together with Udacity, is our newly-released, free, self-paced online course. You'll learn how to build Android apps using industry-standard tools and libraries in the Kotlin programming language. Android development fundamentals are taught in the context of an architecture that provides the scaffolding for robust, maintainable applications. The course covers why and how to use Android Jetpack components such as Room for databases, Work Manager for background processing, the Navigation component, and more. You'll use popular community libraries to simplify common tasks such as Glide for image loading, Retrofit for networking, and Moshi for JSON parsing. The course teaches key Kotlin features such as coroutines to help you write your app code more quickly and concisely. As you work through the course, you'll build fun and interesting apps, such as a Mars photo gallery, a trivia game, a sleep trac...

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...