Last night (India time!) we had Google I/O, which at its core is a developer focused event. Here are the some of the biggest announcements made at the keynote.
Android
With Android 12L last year and Android 13 this fall, Google has been focusing on enhancing the experience on “large screen” devices like tablets and foldables. And Google is leading by example with Android’s large screen ambitions by updating over 20 of their own apps to look and act better on tablets and foldables, this includes YouTube Music, the Play Store, and Google TV.
Google is also integrating TensorFlow Lite into Play Services. Because of this, developers can now depend on the bundled version of the library to reduce the size of their application.
On the privacy front, there’s a new ML-based “Google Code Scanner” API for scanning things like QR codes and barcodes. The work is delegated to Google Play Services, which saves your app from needing the camera permission, and the scanning is done on-device, keeping the data securely offline.
Android Studio
During the I/O developer keynote, Google showed the next steps for Android Studio, with a look at the upcoming “Dolphin” release, which is moving into Beta testing phase.
- View Compose animations and coordinate them with Animation Preview.
- Define annotation classes to easily include and apply multiple Compose preview definitions at once.
- Track recomposition counts for your composables in the Layout Inspector.
- Easily pair and control Wear OS emulators and launch tiles, watch faces, and complications directly from Android Studio.
- Diagnose app issues faster with Logcat V2.
Looking further ahead, the latest Canary release, dubbed Electric Eel, is testing out a variety of new features.
For starters, Google has launched a new “Google Play SDK Index” that offers public information about the versions of Android dependencies and SDKs. This SDK Index is being integrated into Android Studio to offer lint warnings about outdated and deprecated packages early on, allowing you to easily fix them before publishing your app.
Android Studio’s resizable emulator is staying in Canary testing for a while longer rather than graduating to Beta. Just like before, there are four layout presets for rapidly checking your app in various common display shapes — phone, unfolded foldable, tablet, and desktop.
Android Studio Electric Eel includes a new, experimental “Device Mirroring” tool that can show your phone’s display on your computer.
Additionally, for Jetpack Compose developers, Android Studio Electric Eel includes an optional “Live Edit” feature that allows changes to your code to be reflected in emulators and previews of your app in real time. This should go a long way toward making design iteration faster. The previous version of live editing for Jetpack Compose was limited to changing literals such as in-app text and dimensions.
Jetpack Compose
For a few years now, Google has been steadily crafting Jetpack Compose, a new UI framework for Android, built to use the advantages of Kotlin while also taking inspiration from Flutter’s (another Google project) declarative UI creation. Since its stable launch nearly a year ago, Jetpack Compose has seen significant adoption from the Android community, with over 100 of the top 1000 Play Store apps using the framework, including Twitter.
The biggest announcement for Compose is that Jetpack Compose for Wear OS has now reached beta testing phase, with Google often considering beta to be ready for production applications.
IO 2022 marks the launch of Jetpack Compose 1.2 Beta. The first highlight of this release is that font padding for text is now optional, one of the most hotly requested features from Compose developers. In a future release, padding will default to being disabled, so it’s definitely worth playing with it in your own app.
On a related note, Compose 1.2 now allows your app to download the fonts it needs, rather than needing to ship it in your APK. This feature is powered by Google Fonts, allowing your Jetpack Compose app to have easy access to over 1000 free fonts. Another textual improvement in Compose 1.2 makes more of your app’s text compatible with Android’s built-in magnifier tool.
Other improvements with Jetpack Compose 1.2 include a new customizable “LazyLayout,” stable lazy grid layouts, WindowInsets to better add Compose to an existing app, and recommended “window size” layouts for testing.
Google is also making it easier to get from one particular part of a Jetpack Compose app to another, with a new Compose-specific adder for the Navigation library, allowing for your compose functions to be set as navigation destinations.
Jetpack
Google’s goals for Jetpack have always focused on making the lives of Android developers easier, be it through APIs to bridge new features to the many versions of Android or unique new libraries to improve apps.
On the latter front, Google has unveiled the concept of “Baseline Profiles” for Jetpack, which take usage data from your app to optimize the most commonly used parts. Those parts are then compiled by the system first, allowing for them to be ready to run faster. To create a Baseline Profile for your own app, you can use the Jetpack Macrobenchmark library.
Google themselves have begun using Baseline Profiles in their apps, with the Play Store’s search results page loading as much as 40% faster. In other instances, Google has seen some apps receive a 30% initial speed boost just by using Baseline Profiles.
To better run your app across multiple windows and on foldables, Jetpack offers the WindowManager library to solve common problems like physical display size changes. WindowManager pairs well with another library, DragAndDrop, which makes it all too easy to accept dragged contents, either from your own app or another.
Jetpack’s new JankStats library does just what it says on the tin, tracking down and offering statistics about instances of “jank” or dropped frames. These moments are recorded along with helpful context of what the user was doing that could help explain inconsistent instances of jank.
For Room, a data persistence library and one of the foundational pieces of the Jetpack suite, Google is readying an update to version 2.5, which begins the effort of rewriting Room in Kotlin. Room 2.5 will also bring support for the newer “Paging 3.0” way of reading and saving data that’s enhanced for Kotlin use. Other Room improvements include easier JOIN queries and AutoMigration changes.
If your project hasn’t yet made the jump to Kotlin, the Jetpack team is preparing a Paging 3.1 update that integrates Guava and Rx for Java alternatives to Kotlin coroutines.
Flutter 3
Flutter, Google’s massive cross-platform app development framework, has reached version 3, bringing Material You, Linux, & macOS support, and more. Linux and macOS Flutter apps.
Meanwhile, part of supporting macOS is that both Flutter and the underlying Dart programming language now have native support for Apple Silicon. Better yet, you can ship Flutter apps in the Universal Binary format, allowing them to run effectively on both Apple Silicon and Intel based Macs. This Apple Silicon support also extends to developers, with the Flutter and Dart SDKs both now ready to run on the latest generations of Mac.
At last year’s Google I/O, shortly after the company announced its then-upcoming Material You design language, the Flutter team confirmed that developers would be able to bring this third generation of Material Design to their own apps. Less than a year later, we now see the fruits of that effort, with Flutter 3 bringing a variety of new Material You widgets.
Beyond that, significant effort has gone into custom theme generation within Flutter 3. Similar to Android 12, it’s possible to automatically craft an app’s entire color scheme from a single starting color. Importantly, though, this capability is in no way limited to Android 12 and its wallpaper-based themes. Should you wish, your app can use just about any color as its baseline for a custom theme.
DART
The hallmark feature of Dart 2.17 is the ability for developers to extend enums as well as override its default functions. This allows enums to act quite a bit more like custom written classes, should you see fit.
In an effort to reduce boilerplate code, Dart 2.17 also introduces the idea of “super parameters” when creating a class that inherits from another class. In the common example of Flutter widgets which always pass on the “key” parameter to the “Widget” class, this should save quite a few lines of code and make your code much easier to read.
Firebase
During Google I/O 2022, the Firebase team shared a suite of new features for Android and Web developers, as well as improvements to security and third-party services.
For many, the most crucial tool that Firebase offers is Crashlytics, a purpose-built tool for identifying issues that users of your app are experiencing and precisely where in your code that issue is occurring. However, until now, that data has been primarily accessed through the Firebase Console in your browser.
With the upcoming release of Android Studio Electric Eel, currently in Canary, your data from Crashlytics is now available in a new “App Quality Insights” window. This makes it even easier to dive into each crash and the parts of your code likely to be responsible. For now, Android Studio’s Crashlytics integration only works with Android applications written in Kotlin or Java, but Firebase Product Lead Francis Ma confirmed that additional support for Flutter applications is coming soon.
Elsewhere in Crashlytics for Flutter developers, the Firebase team has vastly improved adding the plugin to your Flutter app, now making it a simple two-step process. Other improvements to Crashlytics for Flutter include better automatic grouping and logging & alerts for critical errors. More broadly, the various Flutter plugins for Firebase are now moving to “general availability” and are being developed more directly by the Firebase team.
For web developers who use Firebase to host their applications, the “firebase deploy” command is being massively upgraded to deeply support two popular frameworks, Next.js and Angular Universal. These improvements will help bring the power of Firebase’s security and CDN to your app with little effort on your part.
On the security front, Firebase App Check is a recently launched service — moving today from beta to general availability — that works to protect your app’s backend from being accessed by illegitimate apps and devices. It does so through, among other things, the Play Integrity API, which checks against common forms of abuse and rooted devices.
For those who want to integrate their apps with third-party services, Firebase is expanding their system of “Extensions.” In addition to new supported partners like Snapchat, some Extensions can now be deeply customized through the use of “events” that let you run your own code in response to workflows from third-party services.
Google Play
The biggest highlight of Google Play’s announcements at I/O is the release of the SDK Index, a web tool that offers insights into the most popular packages in use on Android today. In particular, you’ll find what permissions they need, what apps use them, and code that may potentially violate Google Play policies.
A new beta program called “LiveOps” will allow developers to submit their applications and special events/discounts/etc. to be featured prominently by the Play Store. Google has said that apps using LiveOps on average see 5% more active users and 4% higher revenue. For now, the LiveOps beta is limited, but developers can register for the chance to join.
Another new feature coming soon to the Play Store is the ability to manage up to 50 store listings for an app, allowing for slight variances between them, perhaps based on an ad campaign or based on the user’s region or interests.
Similarly, developers of apps that have subscription plans can now create a diverse set of slightly different offers and even flexible pricing. There’s even a way to change the price of a subscription for new customers while leaving existing customers at the older cost.
On the security front, the Play Console is also working to make it easier to keep your app’s signing keys safe. As a best practice, Google Play App Signing can be configured to automatically rotate to a new signing key on an annual basis. Additionally, Play App Signing is in the process of switching to exclusively using Google Cloud Key Management, both for newly generated keys and migrating existing keys to the service.
Any of the updates I may have missed? Any of the above need more details on? Please let me know! 🙂
Kenrick Vaz 