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MANUEL VIVO: Welcome to "Now in Android,"
your ongoing guide to what's new in the world of Android
development.
This is episode number 46.
Let's start talking about the changes for ratings and reviews
in Google Play.
Google Play is making ratings more
personalized and indicative of the experience
its individual user can expect with new changes coming soon.
From November 2021, users on phones
will start to see ratings specific to their registered
country.
And early in 2022, users on other form factors,
such as tablets, Chromebooks, and wearables,
will start to see ratings specific to the device
that they are on.
Google Play has also made enhancements
to Play Console to help developers understand
the ratings and reviews, especially across form factors,
the bias type insights, more flexible date and period
selections, and easier data downloading.
The MAD Skills series keeps going on.
The series on Performance has come to an end,
with the useful live Q&A session,
and a new series has just started.
This time is about Hilt. We already
have two episodes out there.
In the first episode, I introduce Dependency Injection,
or DI for short, and Hilt, by comparing
it to manual DI to show you how Hilt
is simplifying your app by removing boilerplate DI code.
In the second episode, Eric Chang
talks about testing best practices, how
to approach testing when using Hilt, the different APIs,
and some tips and tricks to optimize your
build and get the most out of testing with Hilt.
Next up, articles.
Meghan Michta wrote about BlockStore,
a new API that allows your app to store user credentials,
that it can later retrieve to re-authenticate users
on a new device.
The blog post explains why, when,
and how you could use BlockStore.
By the way, Jetpack's WindowManager library
is already in beta, and Pietro Maggi
wrote a blog post about the new APIs included in the library,
and how to use them in your app, namely window layout info that
contains the display features of a window,
such as whether the window encompasses a fold or hinge.
Fold being a feature that enables
you to monitor the folding state of a foldable device,
to determine device posture.
And window metrics that provides the current window metrics
or the overall display metrics.
What else?
Widgets got awesome improvements in Android 12.
Read Murat Yener's blog post to learn about advanced features
to make your widget more interactive, easier
to configure, and provide a better UI experience.
You might remember that prior to Android 12,
reconfiguring a widget meant that users
had to delete their existing widget,
and add it again with the new configuration.
Well, that's not the case anymore.
On a different topic, Duolingo solved their performance
and developer productivity degrades
due to scalability issues in their app architecture.
In this blog post by Kateryna Semenova,
you can read about how they were able to solve these performance
problems and regain developer productivity by refactoring
to a model-view-viewmodel architecture
and using Dagger and Hilt for dependency injection.
Related to that, great app experiences
are great for business.
App excellence is something we want
to help all developers achieve.
This blog post by Jacob Lehrbaum talks
about internal best practices your company can follow
to get an awesome user experience in your app.
Disclaimer, this might take a cross-functional approach
with engineering, design, product, and business teams
working toward a common goal.
Not only did we publish articles, but also videos.
A new series of videos about accessibility has started.
The first video by Caren Chang introduces the series
that demonstrates how to build Android apps with accessibility
in mind.
In the second video, Shailen Tuli
shows you the different configurations and features
you can find in the accessibility settings,
and why a person may use them.
Lastly, there has been a new episode of The Android
Developers Backstage, posted since the last "Now
in Android."
Episode 173 covers more benchmarking.
In this episode, Chet, Romain, and Tor
talk with Chris Craik and Rahul from the toolkit performance
team about the recently released macrobenchmark
tool and library.
Listen to it to learn how the benchmark libraries work,
how to use them, how they relate to the system
tracing, and more.
And that's it for this time.
You can find all the links to the content
I mentioned in the "Now in Android"
Episode 46 blog post in Medium.
And to get notified about future episodes,
don't forget to like and subscribe to the Android
Developers YouTube channel.
Talk to you soon.
Bye.
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