Author/Android team

At this year’s Google I/O conference, we discussed how your app can fit into the various screen sizes of Android devices. If you missed the meeting broadcast live, can learn more about the contents of one of the most important, you can also view the seamless building across | Google I/O devices experience wonderful review video to understand

Tablets, foldable devices, and large-screen devices

It’s becoming increasingly important to design apps that run smoothly on big-screen devices, including tablets, foldable devices and Chrome OS laptops. There are already more than 250 million large screen Android devices in use. At the same time, new foldable devices make it easier for users to multitask and create a new tabletop experience that requires no holding. See Disney+ example using desktop mode on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2.

▽ Disney+ example using desktop mode on Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2

Fortunately, it’s also become easier to design apps that seamlessly scale to fit any device size — including dynamic resizing on Chrome OS and foldable devices, and building responsive layouts with Jetpack Compose or ConstraintLayout. We’ve also looked at how users interact with large-screen devices, such as where their fingers are placed on the screen, and provided you with apis and tools to simplify such interactions:

  • SlidingPaneLayout 1.2.0 helps you automatically resize content to fit more space;
  • A vertical navigation bar provides a more ergonomic experience on a large screen;
  • Constraint Layout 2.1 and MotionLayout help update collapse and transition states;
  • Maximum widths on components to avoid bad UI stretching during operations;
  • Jetpack WindowManager lets you easily take advantage of new hardware features such as hinges and folds.

We’ve also made updates to the Android platform, Chrome OS, and Jetpack WindowManager to optimize the app experience by default. For example, many UI elements now have default maximum width values to ensure that they look better on large screens, while improvements to the Display API ensure that existing applications continue to render correctly on foldable devices even if they don’t use Windows Manager to query window metrics.

You can watch the video below to learn more about Google I/O to help you build for larger screens:

  • A glance at foldable devices, tablets and big screens
  • Five tips for getting your application ready for the big Screen
  • Chrome OS input items
  • Optimize your Android games and apps to run on Chrome OS

For more details, you can check out our previous tweets about Foldable devices, Tablets, and Big Screens, or check out a case study on how Google Duo can increase engagement and improve ratings.

Wear OS

We’ve released the biggest update to the Wear platform to date, with new features, apis and tools to help developers build beautiful, high-quality wearable experiences.

Our new Jetpack API will help you simplify your development. The Jetpack card library gives users quick access to the information they need most, as well as providing the desired operational interaction. Another notable addition is the Ongoing Activities API, which enables you to let users navigate elsewhere to start some other task, such as music playing, before returning to your app. Both libraries are currently in the Alpha phase.

We’ve also released a new set of health and fitness apis that act as a mediator for sensors and associated algorithms on devices to provide apps with high-quality data related to activity, exercise, and health. The Alpha version of the Health Services Platform is now available.

Download Android Studio Arctic Fox Beta to try out the new Wear System Mirror Developer Preview and start preparing your app for the new platform. You can check out the Google I/O presentation video below to learn more about the announcement:

  • Wear Update Overview

  • Create your first card in Wear

  • Download Android Studio Arctic Fox Beta now

You can also see our previous tweets “watching the I/O | Wear update check for more details, but can be by speech video to understand how a company to build on the Wear.

Android TV

At THIS year’s I/O, we announced several new tools and features to simplify the development of the Android TV operating system:

  • Cast Connect is paired with Stream Transfer to support streaming of existing audio and video between projection devices, while Stream Expansion supports simultaneous playback of audio on multiple devices.
  • We are now launching the first Google TV emulator alongside the Android TV emulator, both running on Android 11.
  • Firebase Test Lab is adding Android TV support so you can Test your application across hundreds of virtual devices in the cloud. Physical devices are coming soon.
  • We’ll be offering Android 12 Beta 1 for TVS on ADT-3.

These updates make it easier to build and test applications across a range of device configurations, while bringing the latest Android 12, Google Assistant, and Cast features to your TV. For more information, watch the I/O Conference’s Android TV and Google TV updates to see the presentation video.

Android for Cars

Android Auto allows applications to connect to the infotainment displays built into many modern cars. To make things easier, we recently added the Android for Cars app library to Jetpack. The library allows navigation, EV charging and parking applications to be integrated directly with compatible vehicles.

We plan to expand it to more app categories in the future, so if you’re interested in bringing your app to Android Auto, please fill out this expression of interest form, or visit the official documentation, and start using the Android for Cars app library immediately. Check out the Android for Cars update at the I/O conference to see the presentation video, or read the blog post for more details.