By Stephanie Cuthbertson, Director of Product Management

The latest in modern Android development

Perhaps because Android is so flexible, we often get developers asking us for advice on how to develop apps. Developers told us they liked the openness of Android, but wanted us to combine that openness with the right approach from the official advice, and make sure it was as simple as possible. Just a few days ago, our team brought back the answer from the Android Developer Summit.

Our answer is “Modern Android Development.” This is a powerful method built for fast and easy development. Remove any obstacles that slow you down so you can focus on creating a first-class experience. We’ve put a lot of effort into modern Android development, like Android Studio and Jetpack. (More than 90 percent of professional developers are now Android Studio users.) Kotlin and Compose are two of our recent hits.

Kotlin is a clean, modern development language — developers have been asking us to provide a language that is easy to use, and Kotlin has now been selected as the official recommended language for Android. Compose is a modern declarative UI toolkit for the next 10 years. It may sound crazy, but when we selected and designed these tools, we really thought about how to increase the “joy” of developers, and we wanted developers to be happy when using these tools: the use of these tools is critical.

In addition, Kotlin and Compose have another very important property, both of which are perfectly compatible with your existing application. That is, you can gradually add Kotlin code and Compose view on your own schedule.

  • Tencent Video link: V.qq.com/x/page/b301…
  • Bilibili video link: www.bilibili.com/video/av738…

Start your development journey with a great modern language: Kotlin

Excellent language support is the starting point of modern Android. In fact, we recently passed a milestone: nearly 60% of our head apps are being developed using Koltin. We are currently working with JetBrains to further enhance Kotlin performance from multiple dimensions, such as: Speed up Kotlin compilation, use KAPT for incremental comment processing, ease delays in IDE code input, add Lint checking items, desugar processing in D8 and R8, and several new optimizations in R8 recognize Kotlin-specific bytecode patterns. Starting today, full IDE support is available for Kotlin build scripts. If you want to improve your development skills, head over to Yoda To learn our new Advanced Android course: Developing with Kotlin. In addition, we’ve launched a new Android developer certification for Expert Kotlin. Interested parties can take the certification exam for the next three months at a reduced price. We are also constantly improving the performance of the three officially supported top-level development languages, Kotlin, Java programming language and C++, in an effort to make the language experience better for you and your team. For example: Java8 language library desugar function, built-in updated version of LLVM NDK r2, GNU Make, Fortify enabled by default, etc.

Jetpack: Build high-quality, powerful applications with less code

Jetpack is mainly used to solve real development problems in everyday work. Jetpack is used by over 84% of the top 10,000 apps in the Play Store. We are also constantly improving Jetpack’s performance, including:

  • The Benchmarking library, which was first unveiled at Google I/O, has been iterated to release candidate. You can use the benchmark library to perform benchmarking analysis on application performance. The procedure for benchmarking analysis is simpler and the analysis results are more reliable.
  • Viewbinding makes it easier for you to access views through code. It has many advantages, such as type safety, minimal build time impact, and no need for the findViewById() function and comment handler.
  • CameraX dramatically simplifies development, allowing you to focus more on the app itself rather than having to deal with the differences in camera behavior between devices in the Android ecosystem. Currently, Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, MOTOROLA and LG have implemented a unified CameraX interface. We launched a preview of CameraX at Google I/O and will release the first Beta in December.

Compose: Build beautiful native apps with the new Android UI development kit — preview comes out strong

Compose helps you easily build beautiful native applications. It takes a declarative UI building approach that makes your code more intuitive and concise. Thanks to Kotlin’s inspiration, Compose also stands out in terms of compatibility. It works seamlessly with existing UI toolkits, making it easy for you to use Compose in your projects at your own pace.

  • Tencent Video link: V.qq.com/x/page/n301…
  • Bilibili video link www.bilibili.com/video/av738…

Jetpack Compose developer preview is now available. To try it out, download the latest preview version of Android Studio. Compose’s development is entirely open source, and you can check out the code in the Android Open Source Initiative (AOSP). During this time, we received a lot of suggestions and feedback, which helped us improve the API; As such, we are grateful to all of our friends who shared their valuable ideas with us in the Developer Research and Kotlinlang Slack group. After the release of the developer preview, the team’s focus will shift to the Beta, so keep sending us feedback! We expect to release the first Beta version of Jetpack Compose next year for use by the official app.

Welcome to Android Studio 4.0 Canary

The first Canary version of Android Studio 4.0 has also been released. The Compose UI tool set is built into this release, bringing you a powerful and highly integrated tool support experience. Android Studio 4.0 includes Compose real-time preview, code completion, and a full suite of Compose sample apps. There are a number of important updates for you to explore, including a new Motion Editor, desugaring capabilities for the Java 8 language library, full support for KTS files and Kotlin Live Templates.

Testing improvements for Android App Bundles and dynamic delivery

Just 18 months after launch, more than 270,000 Android App Bundles have been released, covering 25% of active installations. We have simplified testing of App Bundles and dynamic delivery based on developer feedback. With Internal App Sharing, you can share a test version of your App bundle just as easily as you share a test APK. You can now authorize any team member to publish a test version of the application, which does not need to be signed with an official release signature key, does not need a version number, and can be a debuggable version. In addition, we allow you to obtain download links for historical versions of your App from the Play Administration (both App Bundles and APK are available). We also introduced dynamically delivered offline testing, which includes a fake Split Install Manager that allows you to copy split files being installed in the Play Store while testing locally.

A modern distribution platform centered on user trust

Google Play has always prioritized user trust and safety. We have a rigorous human audit system, an improved Play Protect protection mechanism, and policy requirements that are constantly updated as we detect security threats. As a result of these efforts, apps installed from the Play Store are far more secure than other distribution channels. This year, we have further strengthened the monitoring capabilities of our platform to better combat abuses such as fake identity, secondary packaging and malicious content. But we know that security cannot be solved overnight. Cyber threats continue to emerge, and there is still much work to be done. With your help, we have reduced access to sensitive data and made the Play platform a safer environment for children and families. In addition, we have restricted app access to SMS and call records, allowing access only to apps whose core functions are these permissions. After the new policy was implemented, the number of apps accessing such sensitive data dropped by 98 percent. As a result of your efforts and efforts, users get better security, and they clearly feel that they have fewer permissions to grant when they download the application.

Android Developer Challenge!

We launched the first Android Developer Challenge more than a decade ago, and today, as modern Android continues to shape the next generation of its platform, we announce the return of the Android Developer Challenge with its first challenge — bringing innovation and machine learning to the world. Live Captions, which brings media content to the lives of the estimated 500 million people with hearing loss, is a perfect example. We hope to enable more and more of these innovations through machine learning, and we believe that with your help, we can make the world of tomorrow come sooner. Read the Android Developer Challenge: Working with you to Use In-Device Machine Learning to Bring Innovation to the World for more details.

Now that the modern Android journey has come to a close, you’ve got a sense of where Android is headed in terms of the developer experience. Finally, thank you for attending the Android Developer Summit a few days ago. Whether you are in person or watching the webbroadcast, I hope you will have a great experience and explore the highlights of Android in a comprehensive and in-depth way from the 60 sessions of technology sharing from more than 100 speakers. Thank you very much!

Please continue to follow the recent tweets on the wechat official account of “Google Developers” and the official account of “Google China” Bilibili. We will continue to update the video of this year’s Android Dev Summit sub-conference with Chinese subtitles. Please stay tuned!

  • Android Developer Summit 2019 Video Series with Chinese subtitles Space.bilibili.com/64169458/ch…

Questions about Android development are welcome, and we will invite Google engineers to answer them after the event. Click here to submit your questions.