DAN GALPIN: If you're just joining us,
welcome to the Android Dev Summit 2019 and the very first
#AskAndroid livestream.
Next up, coming straight from the main stage where
they delivered the keynote address,
are Dave Burke, Android's engineering VP,
and director of developer experience, Steph Custber--
bleh, Steph Cuthbertson.
[LAUGHTER]
Sorry.
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: You're good.
DAN GALPIN: I know, I know.
You've been not saying it.
I just-- I actually tried.
LYLA FUJIWARA: All right, so if you
have any questions for the keynote
or either of these folks, please remember
to use the hashtag #AskAndroid tag in the livestream.
We have somebody who is actively grabbing your questions.
All right, so with that, first question?
DAN GALPIN: Yeah.
So what is your favorite announcement from the keynote?
DAVE BURKE: Whoo.
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Oh, that's a tough one.
DAVE BURKE: That is a tough one.
DAN GALPIN: I know.
You have to pick one of your children.
DAVE BURKE: Can I, like--
can I do an umbrella one, like Android Studio 4, I think?
Because there's just so much good stuff in there.
Like, I'm excited because it's the first time that we actually
have Compose easily accessible, right?
So you just download and use it.
There's also the Style Inspector or the Layout Inspector--
I always call it the wrong thing--
where you can actually find out why different styles are
being applied.
That's pretty cool.
The Bill Profiler.
What am I forgetting?
There's just so much--
Motion Editor!
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Motion Editor is really cool.
LYLA FUJIWARA: We just had Tor and Chet on,
so Tor was talking about a lot of this stuff.
You're pretty aligned.
DAN GALPIN: We had a-- remember we had that discussion that
was about two weeks ago, and you said to me--
it was like, hey Dave, I think there's a lot in this release.
And we were going to call it 3 point--
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: That's right.
DAVE BURKE: --7 or-- and you were like--
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: It was like 3.85 or something.
DAVE BURKE: And yeah.
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: And we were--
we finally said, there's so much in here,
we should just call it 4.0.
DAVE BURKE: So I think that's the big one.
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Yeah.
And I think-- I mean, obviously the announcements
are around Compose going to Developer View.
Like, that's a very big deal, and I
think it would be really exciting to have people
try that out and give us feedback,
so that would be probably the easy one.
I also-- like, there's a bunch of other really cool things
in there.
I agree with Dave.
Little things like the Layout Inspector, I think,
really speak to the attention to detail from the team.
I mean, people have been asking for something like that
for a long time, when you're coding themes and styles
and you're trying to figure out what the heck just happened.
So it's really, I think, things that are
both very big and then small.
And also, I don't know.
I'd say I'm pretty excited about the App Bundles work,
too, because that's one of those things where just by adopting
it, you get a bunch of goodness by default, like making
your app smaller.
That's pretty awesome.
DAN GALPIN: Yeah.
I'm actually really excited about the Build Profiler.
DAVE BURKE: Yeah.
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Yeah.
DAN GALPIN: Like that's been something
everybody's been asking for for a long time,
so that's really, really cool, too.
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Yeah.
Yeah, that's super cool, being able to find out where--
DAN GALPIN: Exactly.
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: --build time is actually getting eaten
up and yeah, it's really neat.
LYLA FUJIWARA: OK, so next question, and this is--
I don't know, I'm interested to see what your response will be.
So Burhanrashid52 asks "Why do we have a new Android OS
version every year?
Can we slow down a bit?"
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Interesting question.
DAVE BURKE: It's job security.
Got to do something.
LYLA FUJIWARA: For all of us.
DAVE BURKE: Well, I mean, I think--
I mean, the first I would say--
I mean, more seriously, it's like we've
got to understand why the question was asked.
But I would say, you know, technology evolves
at such a fast pace, right?
So we've got to constantly keep up with that.
And so, for example, we talked today about foldables, right?
And so this is actually a really exciting space,
and I think if you--
over the next few years, you're going
to see some pretty amazing devices.
It's early, and I think it's one of those things where
some folks are like, oh, I see something there.
I'm not sure.
But it's going to be exciting, and so we
have to evolve the operating system
to make sure that we keep up with technology
or even lead it.
I think the question probably gets
more to the fact that like, when there's a new operating
system released, it can be sometimes
an effort to update to it.
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Yeah.
DAVE BURKE: And I think that's--
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Yeah, I think
that's what developers are really asking is--
I think the question is, how can you
make it easy for us to adopt and not disrupt us?
And I do think that is a really important consideration.
It's a big part of why we did something
that was a little unprecedented today,
which is we wanted to share, look, here's
how we think about the platform milestones for people
to prepare, as well as starting to talk about things
like OS resiliency and where we're going with permissions.
We've never talked about those so early,
and the reason is because we want to give people a chance
to give us feedback as well as adopt, because I think
it's a question of both being very
thoughtful about any breaking change,
keeping them to an absolute minimum.
I think of it as, as few as possible and no less,
because there-- as Dave said, there is also,
with the evolution of foldables, what's happening with machine
learning, like, the platform is going to involve,
and that's a-- evolve, and that's a big part
of why we love Android.
It's just about finding the right balance.
LYLA FUJIWARA: Yeah.
DAVE BURKE: The only constant is change is basically
what's happening here.
But yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And we spend a lot of time on app compatibility.
That's our phrase for, like, making sure that we
haven't broken anything, right?
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Yeah.
DAVE BURKE: And so--
and we're getting better at it.
I'm not going to pretend we're perfect at it,
but we're getting better at it and putting more effort
into that, so.
But it's a great question.
DAN GALPIN: So another question we have is from Puneeet99.
"What is project mainline and how is it
different from project treble?"
DAVE BURKE: OK, so it's--
they're orthogonal in a graphical sense.
So Project Treble was all about putting a horizontal line
between the hardware specific code--
and when I say "hardware," I mean silicon specific,
so what SOC you have-- and then actual peripherals
that your particular device may have.
So it's that horizontal line between the hardware
specific code and then the operating system code.
And that was one of those things that ideally,
when we created the operating system, like in 1.0,
you would've put that in place, but Android was moving so fast
and it wasn't worth doing.
It was better to go quickly.
Later we put this foundation in, and it means now
when a new version of the operating system comes out,
it will work on the older code from the hardware
and it just allows developers to move much-- or device makers
to move much more quickly.
And you saw that with the beta program
for Q, Android 10, where we had like 21 devices from 13 OAMs,
right?
So it works.
Mainline, think of it as-- this is where I meant "orthogonal."
Think of it as vertical lines.
And so they're like pieces of the operating
system on top of Treble that you can slice out and then update.
And I'm excited about--
so they're complementary.
I'm excited about Mainline, because it
means we can take sort of, I would
say like boring parts of the operating
system, like cryptography-- which, you know, there's
some cool math there, by the way--
but boring from a typical developer.
You just expect it to work.
And so I think this allows us to basically update
those components and have uniformity
across different devices.
LYLA FUJIWARA: OK, and I think we're literally just about
out of time, so I want to-- need a little bit
time to really thank Dave and Steph for coming on and talking
to us, talking to all of you.
And--
DAN GALPIN: Is there any last thing you
want to say to the livestream?
DAVE BURKE: We should do a--
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: So much.
DAVE BURKE: Yeah, so much.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
LYLA FUJIWARA: Very short last thing--
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: --all these things
I want to talk about.
Thank you for being here.
I think that I mostly would just be wanting
to say thank you so much to everyone
for being a part of Dev Summit, for all the feedback.
It's-- we're really grateful.
DAVE BURKE: Yeah.
STEPHANIE CUTHBERTSON: Yeah.
LYLA FUJIWARA: Cool.
DAN GALPIN: All right, well, that
concludes this portion of the #AskAndroid livestream.
Our next speaking session is about to start
and another #AskAndroid will follow.
So next time, we'll be answering your questions
about Jetpack Compose.
LYLA FUJIWARA: All right, so remember, post your questions!
Bye.
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