Google is kicking off its annual Android Dev Summit with a welcome lineup of updates, new development libraries, and enhanced tooling. This year’s big talking points feature Jetpack Compose, Material Design 3, and Android Studio Flamingo, but most of the individual form factors are also making appearances.
This year’s event schedule diverges significantly from most shows in the past. Instead of placing all the sessions on consecutive days, the schedule has been spread out to give developers more time to focus on the content of each one. The keynote and first set of sessions are today, October 24th, featuring the theme of Modern Android Development. The second and third days land on November 9th and November 14, focusing on the themes of Form Factor and Platform, respectively.
Jetpack Compose
Ever since Jetpack Compose became the de facto development strategy for Android apps, Google has been rolling out new features, support, and improvements at a breakneck pace. To make new features and library versions easier to follow, milestone releases will now be lumped together under a Gradle Bill of Materials (BOM), the first of which is dubbed Compose October 22.
Material Design 3 components are a key feature in this release, but it also includes an assortment of other new or enhanced UI components, including lazy staggered grids, variable fonts, pull to refresh, snapping in lazy lists, draw text in canvas, URL annotations in text, hyphenation, and LookAheadLayout.
Back in July, Compose for Wear OS launched, simplifying the task of building apps for the wearable platform. Now the attention is turning toward Android TV, as it becomes the latest platform to be supported by Compose. At this time, Featured Carousel and Immersive List are among the notable new components, but more are on the way.
Android Studio Flamingo
Perhaps the most important addition in the upcoming Android Studio Flamingo release is a brand-new Android SDK Upgrade Assistant. It takes inspiration from the Android Gradle plugin (AGP) Upgrade Assistant, which helps with updating syntax and compatibility requirements in gradle scripts when new versions break the old syntax or add potential improvements. The new upgrade assistant should make it substantially easier to update existing apps to readily work with the yearly rollout of major new Android versions. With automation like this, developers are likely to spend a lot less time in maintenance mode and a lot more time working on new features.
Compose also makes some notable appearances, particularly with several new and updated templates that are built with Compose out of the box and include Material Design 3 components by default.
To aid in the development of apps based on Compose, Android Studio is also gaining a feature dubbed Composition Tracing, which adds support for composable functions in the system tracer. This makes it easier to identify app performance issues caused by interfaces that recompose too frequently.
Google also made a point of calling out improvements to App Quality Insights, a feature that comes with Firebase Crashlytics, and notes that Live Edit is now on by default for Compose applications.
The latest Android Studio Flamingo release is available for download, but keep in mind that it’s currently a canary build and may not be stable enough for use in a production environment.
Wear OS and Tablets
Unlike Android TV, which just gained its first Compose components, today’s announcements for Wear OS and tablet UIs seem to be intended to keep attention on these form factors. Nevertheless, there are still a few new things here.
Android Studio Flamingo includes updated templates for Wear OS apps built on Compose, and there is now a stable Android R (i.e. Android 11) emulator system image for Wear testing. Google also gave a nod to Health Connect, the centralized repository built in collaboration with Samsung. It was first announced in May, but with more watches shipping with or updating to Wear OS 3, there’s an opportunity for developers to begin integrating support.
Tablets received even less attention today, but a tease for the Form Factors sessions on November 9 suggests they’ll be a primary focus in those sessions. However, Google also incorporated additional recommendations for large screen layouts and Canonical layouts in Android Studio. Development for tablets was also made easier with the recent support for resizable and desktop emulators, plus visual lint support in the previous Android Studio Electric Eel release.
To catch up on the keynote or any of today’s developer sessions, check out the Android Dev Summit schedule.
