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SPEAKER: Welcome to "Now in Android,"
your ongoing guide to what's new and notable in the world
of Android development.
This week, we're covering Android 14 Developer Preview 2,
new Wear OS app quality requirements,
the release of the full Android Basics
course with Compose, advanced layout concepts,
and an intro to drawing in Compose,
accessing composables from UiAutomator,
multi-window and activity embedding,
TensorFlow Lite in Google Play Services, and more.
Android 14 Developer Preview 2 is now available,
with additional enhancements to privacy, security, performance,
customization, and more.
Examples include changes that reduce
the amount of CPU time your app gets once it goes
into the cache state, selected photos access,
which allows Android 14 users to grant
partial access to their media library,
when an app requests media permissions,
and regional preferences, which enable users
to personalize temperature units the first day of the week,
and numbering systems.
We announced upcoming policy changes
to improve both Wear OS app quality and app presentation
within Google Play.
In addition, Wear OS apps must target
API level 30, Android 11, to continue
being discoverable for devices that run Android 11 Plus.
The new requirements will come into effect
on Google Play starting August 31, 2023.
Until then, the existing policies will be in place.
The overall mandatory Wear OS app review process
remains unchanged.
The full Android Basics with Compose course
is now available, covering how to create Android apps using
Jetpack Compose, exploring fundamentals of the Kotlin
programming language, Android app
architecture, commonly-used Jetpack libraries, and view
Compose interoperability along the way.
We continue the MAD Skills series
focused on Jetpack Compose layout and modifiers
with one new episode on advanced layout concepts,
where Simona covered how to handle more complex layout
requirements, harnessing the power of layout phase
and constraints to build custom layouts in Compose.
We're doing a live Q&A session on Compose layout MAD
Skills on March 9.
So be sure to get your questions in to hear them answered live.
We had some interesting articles.
Roberto covered how to leverage multi
window and activity embedding to help your users
multitask while taking advantage of increased screen
real estate.
Tomasz illustrated how to go about accessing composables
from UiAutomator, leveraging modifier dot test tag.
In videos, Luke covered new capabilities
in Block Store, which is our API to help your users seamlessly
transfer to a new device such as a new key value pair
feature that allows you to save up to 64 times
more data, along with the ability to pair
binary packets with a key.
Thomas detailed how to use TensorFlow Lite with Google
Play services, now Android's official ML inference engine.
It can help reduce your app size by up to 5 megabytes,
makes sure your app is up to date
with the latest stable version of TensorFlow Lite,
and supports GPU acceleration.
Rebecca explored custom drawing in Jetpack Compose, including
DrawScope, drawing modifiers, understanding
the coordinate system, DrawScope transformations, such as scale,
translate, rotate, and inset, and how to use all of this
to draw a filled, smooth, animated path.
In episode 195 of the "Android Developer's Backstage" podcast,
Chet and Roman talked to Jeff and Anton
from the mainline team about modular system components,
and the new SDK Extension Framework,
which lets you access them.
So that's it for this week with Android 14 Developer Preview 2.
New Wear OS app quality requirements,
the release of the full Android Basics with Compose,
advanced layout concepts, and an intro to drawing in Compose,
accessing composables from UiAutomator, multi window
and activity embedding, TensorFlow Lite in Google Play
Services, and more.
Remember to like, subscribe, share.
Stay safe.
And come back here soon for another update from the Android
developer universe.
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