Android Developers Blog

Posted by Frank van Diggelen, Principal Engineer and Jennifer Wang, Product Manager At Android, we want to make it as easy as possible for developers to create the most helpful apps for their users. That’s why we aim to provide the best location experience with our APIs like the Fused Location Provider API (FLP). However, we’ve heard from many of you that the biggest location issue is inaccuracy in dense urban areas, such as wrong-side-of-the-street and even wrong-city-block errors. This is particularly critical for the most used location apps, such as rideshare and navigation. For instance, when users request a rideshare vehicle in a city, apps cannot easily locate them because of the GPS errors. The last great unsolved GPS problem This wrong-side-of-the-street position error is caused by reflected GPS signals in cities, and we embarked on an ambitious project to help solve this great problem in GPS. Our solution uses 3D mapping aided corrections, and is only feasible to be done at ...

Posted by Chet Haase It’s a Wrap! We’ve just finished the first series in the MAD Skills series of videos and articles on Modern Android Development. This time, the topic was Navigation component, the API and tool that helps you create and edit navigation paths through your application. The great thing about videos and articles is that, unlike performance art, they tend to stick around for later enjoyment. So if you haven’t had a chance to see these yet, check out the links below to see what we covered. Except for the Q&A episode at the end, each episode has essentially identical content in the video and article version, so use whichever format you prefer for content consumption. Episode 1: Overview The first episode provides a quick, high-level overview of Navigation Component, including how to create a new application with navigation capability (using Android Studio’s handy application templates), details on the containment hierarchy of a navigation-enabled UI, and a...

Posted by Jeremy Woods, Software Engineer, Android UI Toolkit The latest versions of the Jetpack Navigation library (2.2.0 and 2.3.0) added a lot of requested features and functionality, including dynamic navigation , navigation back stack entries , a library for navigation testing , additional features for deep linking , and more. Let’s go over the most important changes, see what problems they solve, and learn how to use them! Dynamic Navigation We’ve updated Navigation to simplify adding dynamic feature modules for your application. Previously, implementing navigation between destinations defined in dynamic feature modules required a lot of work. Before you could navigate to the first dynamic destination, you needed to add the Play Core library and the Split Install API to your app. You also needed to check for and download the dynamic module. Once downloaded, you could then finally navigate to the destination. On top of this, if you wanted to have an on-screen progress bar for th...

Posted by Allen Huang and Rohan Shah, Product Managers on Android UI One of the biggest changes in Android Q is the introduction of a new gesture navigation. Just to recap - with the new system navigation mode - users can navigate back (left/right edge swipe), to the home screen (swipe up from the bottom), and trigger the device assistant (swipe in from the bottom corners) with gestures rather than buttons. By moving to a gesture model for system navigation, we can provide more of the screen to apps to enable a more immersive experience. We wanted to give folks an inside look at how we’ve approached this challenge, the rationale, and some of the trade-offs as well. There is some nerding out on design around gestures ahead, but hopefully it provides some insight into our process and how we balance the developer and OEM ecosystem in service of users. If you’re looking for more detail on how to handle these changes as an app developer, check out Chris’s “Going edge-to-edge” article serie...

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 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...