Diana Wong, Product Manager, Android Jetpack
In the #11WeeksOfAndroid series, we covered contacts and identities, privacy and security, Android 11 compatibility, and the development language. This installment focuses on Jetpack. We’ll be bringing you #11WeeksOfAndroid, an in-depth look at Android’s key technology points, and you won’t miss anything.
Important update
In 2018, we launched Android Jetpack to help developers follow best practices, reduce boilerplate code, and write code that works across different Android versions and devices. We are honored by the widespread use and good feedback from developers. 47% of the top 1,000 apps on Google Play use at least two Jetpack libraries, not including core libraries such as AppCompat or Lifecycle. Over the past year, we’ve worked hard to make the basics easier for Android developers so you can focus on the code that really matters. We’ve made a number of updates to our existing and new Jetpack libraries, simplifying the process of building high-quality applications.
Video resources
We’ve also pushed a lot of updates over the past year! To get a full picture of Jetpack’s new features, you can check out our related talk in the #Android11 release, where we outlined the many updates to the Jetpack library and provided a guide to getting started.
We also recently delved into major releases like Hilt, including Cheat Sheets to help you get started, and we upgraded our sample code to Hilt for dependency injection. Less template = more fun.
Paging 3.0 is our first Kotlin-first library written based on coroutines. The Paging library adds functionality that developers need, such as better error handling, simpler list transformations (such as map or filter), and support for common functions such as list separators, headers, and footers. We have also added RxJava, LiveData and ListenableFutures support, and backward compatibility with Paging 2 to make migration easier.
Want to use the camera in your app? CameraX Beta helps developers handle extreme situations across devices and operating system versions without you having to worry. Watch the video below to learn more about CameraX Beta.
This year, we released Navigation 2.3 with a number of major improvements to help you easily navigate between your app’s different screens and follow Android UI principles. Watch the video below to start exploring!
Focus on permissions
In Android 11, we’ve been working on giving users more control over sensitive permissions. Making it as easy as possible for developers to build Android apps is also a big focus of our work. With the privacy changes of the past few releases, Android Jetpack is making it easier for your app to handle permissions. Common use cases are now type-safe with the new ActivityResult API. These changes simplify the way you request permissions, and we will continue to work to make permissions even simpler in the future. You can learn more in the official documentation.
Begin to learn
Check out our new learning plan and get up to speed on all the highlights of this episode. This series of tutorials will guide you through our new content, complete the quiz and receive a reward — a shiny Jetpack badge on your Google Developer profile. In addition to the learning plan, we also have a new Jetpack resource library to help you easily find Jetpack libraries and their recent updates.
knowledge
The Jetpack library integrates best practices and provides advisory guidance to make it easier to build higher quality Android applications. We announced new features for Navigation and WorkManager, improved CameraX stability, increased Biometrics robustness, and more. We’ve also released new Jetpack libraries, such as Hilt, which we’ve launched with Dagger, and new libraries to help improve app launch. Your feedback is very important to us. Please try these libraries out, tell us what you think and help us make improvements!
More wonderful
You can check out the full playlist of #11WeeksOfAndroid video content, or go to the official website to learn more about the topic. We will continue to focus on more new areas, please pay attention, also please continue to pay attention to us, looking forward to your feedback. Thank you for being with us.