[MUSIC PLAYING]
MANUEL VIVO: Hi there, everyone.
Welcome to another episode of "Now in Android,"
episode number 55.
Today I'll be talking about Android Studio, the DataStore
MAD Skill series, updates on Glance, Automotive
OS, and Google Maps, and all of our usual segments,
including the recent AndroidX releases, articles, videos,
and updates from the "ADB" podcast.
Android Studio Bumblebee is now stable
and it has already received a batch release
to address some launch issues.
So make sure to upgrade.
Some notable additions include a unified test execution
between Android Studio and your continuous integration server,
convenient pairing flows to support
ADB over Wi-Fi, improved Profiler tools
to help you identify and analyze junk in your app,
and new ways to preview animations
and UI interactions without deploying your app to a device.
The MAD Skills series on DataStore
continues on with more episodes.
In the third episode, Simona covers Preferences DataStore,
one of the two DataStore implementations.
As Preferences DataStore uses key value pairs
to store smaller data sets, it is the Jetpack solution that
replaces SharedPreferences.
In the fourth episode, Simona covers Proto DataStore,
the other implementation.
The difference is that Proto DataStore
uses typed objects backed by protocol buffers
to store smaller data sets while providing type safety.
Simona also produced an episode about DataStore
best practices, where you will learn about performing
synchronous work and how to make DataStore work with Kotlin Data
Class serialization and Hilt. This
is "Best Practices, Part 1," so watch out for future episodes.
Last year, we announced the Wear Tiles API.
To complement that Java API, we are
excited to announce that support for Wear OS tiles
has been added to Glance, a new framework built
on top of Jetpack Compose, designed
to make it easier to build for surfaces outside your Android
app.
Also, the Car App Library version 1.2 is already in beta,
enabling app developers to start building their navigation,
parking and charging apps for Android Automotive OS.
Now that we are talking about library updates,
let's take a look at what's up with AndroidX releases.
Navigation 2.4 is stable now.
You can see how much this version introduces
in the release notes.
But to name a few, it was rewritten in Kotlin,
it offers two-pane integration, navigation routes,
Kotlin DSL improvements, and multiple back stack support.
With this, the hilt-navigation-compose library
also reaches 1.0 stable.
SlidingPaneLayout 1.2 is also stable
and it's now fault-aware.
The automatic fault-aware behavior of SlidingPaneLayout
is possible due to the AndroidX Window Library that reached
its first 1.0 stable milestone.
The window library adds support for folding phones
through the WindowInfoTracker and FoldingFeature APIs.
The CameraX libraries version 1.1 reached beta
and from now on, all CameraX libraries
will align on the same version number.
The team also released a library that
integrates Google Maps with Jetpack Compose.
It contains composables for the Maps SDK for Android.
You can read more in the project's Read Me.
OK, moving on to articles.
Kateryna Semenova wrote about improving app performance
with Baseline Profiles, or how to improve
startup time by up to 40%.
Startup time is important, and Baseline Profiles
are a new mechanism to provide profiles and improve your user
experience.
If you are into media and want to know
how Oboe, Google's high performance audio library,
has improved their recording quality and completion
rates of Smule, a karaoke app, take a look
at this other article.
If you enjoy reading how companies succeed using Google
products, there are some stories about how
Microsoft Lens increased developer productivity using
CameraX, and Zomato increased their app speed by 30%.
This time, we got a couple of notable documentation updates.
The guide to background work was updated to help
you choose which library is best for your use case--
WorkManager or Coroutines.
It depends on whether or not the work is persistent
and if it needs to run immediately,
it's long-running, or deferrable.
If you work on Android TV, you should
be aware of the accessibility best practices
that the team created.
It provides recommendations for both native and non-native
apps.
Get to know why accessibility is important for your TV app, how
to evaluate your apps when TalkBack
is used, how to adopt system caption settings, and more.
Talking about accessibility, next up
in the Accessibility series is TalkBack, the Google screen
reader.
In this video, learn what TalkBack is, how to set it up,
how to navigate through your app with it,
and how you can use it to improve
the accessibility of your app.
Lastly, a new episode of "The Android Developers Backstage"
is out.
In episode 182, "Large Screens Are a Big Deal,"
Clara, Florina, and Daniel join your usual hosts
to talk about large screens, what they are,
and what they mean for app developers.
You will also learn about the resources at your disposal
to build high-quality experiences
on large-screen devices, from samples
and guidance to canonical layouts and new APIs,
such as window size classes.
Disclaimer-- Florina is very excited about this.
Don't miss the epic "Large screens!
Large screens!
Large screens!" intro.
And that's it for this time.
You can find all the links to the content
I mentioned in the "Now in Android" episode
55 blog post in Medium.
To get notified about future episodes,
don't forget to like and subscribe to the Android
Developers YouTube channel.
Bye.
[MUSIC PLAYING]