Google is dedicated to providing a more modern Android development experience with new improvements, significant updates, and new releases announced across the platform at this year’s Google I/O conference. This is the first virtual Google I/O event the company has hosted since last year’s pandemic. According to Karen Ng, product lead for Android developer tools, the announcements focus on how to help developers build higher-quality apps faster and easier. “We want to help you build higher-quality apps faster, and we want that to scale across the entire ecosystem, not for a small set, but we’re thinking about the tools and APIs that help you do that,” said Ng.
Key Android announcements from the conference included:
Jetpack Compose 1.0 is to be released this summer
The company revealed version 1.0 of its modern toolkit for building native UI is expected in July. The toolkit is built with Kotlin and designed to make it easier to build native apps across the Android platform. The company announced plans for Jetpack Compose at its Google I/O event two years ago. The release is expected to incorporate the update of Material You with new Material components and support for large screens.
Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) beta announced
The beta version of the latest release is available today. It is designed to help developers build high-quality applications faster by improving Kotlin build speeds, typing latency, and test results across multiple test devices. The latest update of the Android IDE focuses on accelerating UI design, extending apps to new appliances, and boosting developer productivity. In addition, it works to help make apps more accessible and performant with optimized debugging databases, faster build speeds, a Memory Profiler, and an Accessibility Scanner.
Kotlin updates
According to the company, more than 1.2 million applications in the Google Play store now use the programming language Kotlin. Ng explained the company is continuing to push the boundaries of Kotlin with a new native annotation processing solution. Kotlin Symbol Processing is an API for parsing Kotlin code and improving speed.
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Android Jetpack improvements
New features include the alpha version of Jetpack Macrobenchmark, which captures extensive interactions that impact application startup and enable developers to improve app performance, and the beta of DataStore, a new Kotlin coroutines API for persistent data.
Updates to WearOS
The company said it is making milestones with its wearable Android development with a new unified platform built with Samsung, a unique consumer experience, and new health and fitness services from Fitbit coming to the forum.
Large screens enhancements
According to Ng, since we are moving into a world where people are using more and more devices such as phones, watches, tablets, and laptops, the company is thinking about how those devices can connect and display data. Google announced new APIs and tools to optimize the viewing experience, resize content automatically, and enable new navigation components.
“Everyone wants their application to be good quality, and they want to be able to do that from the Android platform easily and not deal with all the specific challenges,” said Ng. “If you look at some of the things we’re releasing, they will be around app performance, so how do I have my app be super performant across things? We are also looking at addressing those pain points, but that’s the promise…help you focus on what your app does well and where your magic is.”
