Android Developers Blog

Posted by Caren Chang , Developer Programs Engineer Android users care a lot about the battery life on their phones. In particular, how your app schedules deferrable background tasks play an important role in battery life. To help you build more battery-friendly apps, we introduced WorkManager as the unified solution for all deferrable background processing needs. Starting November 1, 2020, we are unifying deferrable background tasks on Android around WorkManager, and GCMNetworkManager will be deprecated and no longer supported. Why WorkManager The WorkManager API incorporates the features of Firebase Job Dispatcher (FJD) and GcmNetworkManager solutions, providing a consistent job scheduling service back to API level 14 while being conscious of battery life. For example, if your app needs to send log files up to the server, it would be more efficient to wait until the device is both charging and connected to WiFi. In this case, WorkManager will ensure that the sync will execute ...

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...