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DAN GALPIN: Welcome to "Now in Android."
This week, we have the 2021 Android Dev Summit, the Android
12 AOSP launch, the launch of "Android Basics"
Unit 6, the conclusion of our "Hilt" and the beginning
of our "Paging" modern Android development series,
Play Console User Management updates,
permissions auto-reset to older devices, WearOS Jetpack
libraries going to stable, more of our accessibility series
"App Excellence," Android 12 WorkManager and system UI,
and CameraX analysis updates.
Android Dev Summit returns on October 27 through 28, 2021.
The show kicks off at 10:00 AM Pacific time
on October 27 with "The Android Show," a technical keynote
with all the latest developer news and updates.
From there, we have over 30 sessions
on a range of technical Android development topics,
and we'll be answering your #AskAndroid questions live.
We released Android 12 to the Android Open Source Project,
or AOSP.
It'll be coming to devices later on this year,
but thank you for your feedback during the beta.
Now, to recap, Android 12 introduces
a new design language called Material
You, along with redesigned widgets, notification UI
updates, stretch overscroll, and app launch splash screens.
We reduced the CPU time used by core system services,
added performance class device capabilities,
made ML accelerator drivers updatable outside of platform
releases, and-- to improve performance--
12 prevents apps from launching foreground services
from the background and using notification trampolines.
The new Privacy Dashboard, approximate location,
microphone and camera indicators,
and toggles in Nearby Device permissions
give users more insight into and control over privacy.
We improved the user experience with a unified API for rich
content insertion, compatible media transcoding,
easier blurs and effects, AVIF image support,
enhanced haptics, new camera effects and sensor
capabilities, improved native crash debugging,
support for rounded screen corners, play-as-you-download,
and Game Mode APIs.
So make sure your apps are ready for Android 12.
The final unit planned for "Android Basics in Kotlin"
that covers using Android Jetpack's WorkManager API
is now live.
"Android Basics in Kotlin" guides students
through learning to program in Kotlin
while learning to build Android apps,
ultimately developing a collection of apps
to start Android developer journeys.
The user and permission tools in Play Console
have a new, de-cluttered interface and new team
management features, making it easier
to make sure every team member has
the right set of permissions to fulfill their responsibilities,
without overexposing unrelated business data.
We've rewritten permission names and descriptions;
clarified differentiation between account
and app-level permissions; added new search, filtering,
and batch editing capabilities; and added the ability
to export this information to a CSV file.
In addition, Play Console users can request access
to actions with a justification.
And we've introduced permission groups
to make it easier to assign multiple permissions at once
to users that share the same or similar roles.
Android 11 introduced permission auto-reset,
automatically resetting an app's runtime permissions when
it isn't used for a few months.
In December 2021, we are starting
to roll this feature out to devices with Google Play
services running Android 6.0 or higher for apps
targeting Android 11 or higher.
Users can manually enable permission auto-reset
for apps targeting API levels 23-plus.
Some apps and permissions are automatically
exempted from revocation, like active device administrator
apps used by enterprises and permissions fixed
by enterprise policy.
If your app is expected to work primarily in the background
without user interaction, you can ask the user
to prevent the system from automatically resetting
your app's permissions.
The five core Android Jetpack WearOS libraries
are now stable, with all the familiar functionality
you've grown used to in the old Wearable Support Library, along
with better support for WearOS 3.0.
We strongly recommend you migrate your WearOS apps
from the Wearable Support library to their AndroidX
equivalents as we make them available in stable.
The "MAD Skills" series covering modern Android development
continues to roll on.
The "Hilt" series finished with a live Q&A,
and you can check out the recording.
The Android Jetpack Paging library is now at version 3.
TJ has launched a new "MAD Skills" series to cover it.
Paging is designed to help you handle large data sets that
come from local storage or over the network within your app,
allowing your app to use network bandwidth and system
resources more efficiently.
The first episode covers how to begin
to incorporate paging in your app
with content coming from a network data source.
It covers how to implement a PagingSource, create a Pager,
and expose a stream of PagingData from the Pager.
Future episodes will cover how to consume paging data
in the UI and how to work with paging data
from two different sources, network and a database cache.
For ongoing content, be sure to check the "MAD Skills" playlist
on YouTube, the articles on Medium,
or our handy landing page.
The accessibility series continues on
to help your app be usable by as many users as possible.
Color contrast can not only help users with visual impairments
use your app, it can help everyone use your app outdoors
in the sun.
The video covers best practices, such as smaller text needing
larger contrast ratios than large text,
as well as how to test your app for proper use of color.
EditText views need to have context for users of TalkBack
to avoid them being announced as EditBox.
The video covers two different ways to avoid this problem--
adding an android:hint attribute to standalone EditText views
and adding an android:labelFor attribute to each text view
that serves as a label.
Both help TalkBack give appropriate context
for a vastly improved user experience.
Also, we've added a new codelab that
covers accessibility best practices within Jetpack
Compose, such as touch target sizes, content descriptions,
click labels, and more.
If you want even more accessibility content,
check out our new accessibility learning pathway.
On our blogs, Manuel talks about Headspace's journey
to app excellence.
They spent eight months refactoring
to a Model-View-ViewModel architecture,
rewriting in Kotlin and improving their test coverage
from 15% to 80%.
The improved app experience increased monthly active users
by 15% and increased review scores from 3.5 to 4.7
between Q2 and Q4 of 2020.
Maru continued our app excellence
blog series, covering the dimensions of performance
excellence, such as stability, loading
times, smooth rendering, battery economy,
and using up-to-date SDKs.
Starting in Android 12, foreground service launch
restrictions were introduced, and these restrictions
can leave your app in a state where calling setForeground may
cause an exception.
Caren blogged about how WorkManager 2.7 introduced
expedited jobs to help your app execute
short and high-priority tasks while giving the system better
control over access to resources.
And Wayne answered some top game development questions
we've gotten since launching the Android Game Development
Kit, or AGDK, in July, ranging from AGDK libraries and tools,
optimizing memory in Android, the upcoming Game Mode API,
and using graphics APIs to target the GPU.
Now there's not a huge amount of notable changes in AndroidX
libraries this week.
We've got some small fixes and updates
to support Kotlin 1.5.30.
CameraX 1.1.0-alpha09 dramatically improved
the efficiency of our RGBA output,
and we've also updated the associated CameraX analysis
documentation and the CameraX TFLite sample.
And speaking of documentation updates,
we've consolidated privacy and security resources
in Design for Safety.
The page includes best practices and resources
to help you design and implement safe, secure, and private apps.
We posted episode 176 of "Android Developers Backstage,"
"S stands for System UI," where Chet, Romain, and Tor have
a chat with members from the Android system UI team,
discussing many of the new features in Android 12's user
interface.
That's it for this time, with Android Dev Summit 2021 coming
soon, Android 12 launching to AOSP, Android
Basics, the "Hilt" and "Paging" "MAD Skills"
series, Play Console user management
updates, permissions auto-reset to older devices, WearOS
Jetpack libraries, more of our accessibility series, "App
Excellence," Android 12 WorkManager and system UI,
CameraX analysis updates, and a new Design for Safety
section on developer.android.com.
Come back here soon for the next update from the Android
developer universe.
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