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MEGHAN MEHTA: Welcome to "Now in Android,"
your ongoing guide to what's new and notable in the world
of Android development.
This week is part one of a two-part series covering
the happenings at Android Developer Summit 2021.
Today we're going to be talking about privacy and security,
large screens, and Android 12.
A key theme of ADS was privacy and security.
Sara and Yacine provided guidelines and best practices
on how to build apps that are private by design
while covering new privacy features in Android 12
and previewing upcoming Android concepts.
They also talked about the memory safety
tools that became available starting at Android 11
and have continued to evolve in Android 12.
These tools can help address memory bugs
and improve the quality and security of your application.
I wrote an article covering the new privacy dashboard, which
gives users a timeline view of apps
that have accessed location, microphone, and camera
within the past 24 hours.
Users can determine exactly when the access occurred,
and they have the option to revoke permissions.
The article also covered using data access auditing
APIs to track data access within your apps
and the permission intent API to present justifications
to users.
Lilian presented a selection of the most unusual, intricate,
and interesting security issues addressed in the last year.
Developers and researchers are available to contribute
to the security of the Android platform
by submitting to the Android Vulnerability Rewards Program.
Tina then went over how the new data safety section
will give you a simple way to showcase
your app's overall safety.
It gives you a place to give users deeper insight
into your app's privacy and security practices
and explains the data in your app may collect
and why, all before users install.
Large screens are the fastest growing segment
of active Android devices with over 250
million active large screen devices running Android.
So make sure to tune in to the following talks
to learn more about adapting to larger form factors.
Clara and Daniel talked about the state of the ecosystem,
focusing on new design guidance, APIs, and tools
to help developers make the most of their UI on different screen
sizes.
They covered the new window size classes,
updating existing apps with views,
Jetpack Compose for all screen sizes, new Android studio
tooling, and how to test apps on different devices
of various sizes, all while tying back
to updated material design guidance for layouts.
Emilie and André introduced new features focused specifically
on making apps look great on large screens, foldables,
and Chrome OS.
They took a deep dive into the Jetpack WindowManager library
to see how to react to foldable posture changes,
work with window dimensions, and easily support
multipane layouts.
Emilie explained how to handle common keyboard and mouse input
events and how to get started with more advanced support,
like keyboard shortcuts, low latency styluses, MIDI,
and more.
Francesco and Will from Zoom explored new user experiences
made possible by the foldable form factor,
focusing on video conferencing and media applications.
They cover how to handle posture changes
with Jetpack's WindowManager API and ConstraintLayout, together
with some best practices to handle video and camera
streams.
Google recently launched new material guidance
for supporting large screens.
In this talk, Liam and Jonathan talked
about how to design and test Android applications that
look and feel great across device types and screen sizes,
from tablets to foldables to Chrome OS.
They covered the fundamentals of how
to fit content to these varying screens,
introduce canonical layouts as a starting point for designs,
show how to leverage foldables, and give tips
on how to structure apps using the principles of responsive
UI.
Dave wrote a post covering the developer preview
of 12L, a feature drop that makes Android 12 even better
on large screens.
With the preview, you can try the new large screen features
to optimize your apps and let us know your feedback.
12L includes a refined UI on large screens
across notifications, quick settings, lock screen,
overview, home screen, and more.
The new taskbar on large screen makes
multitasking more robust and intuitive,
allowing users to instantly switch
to favorite apps on the fly.
Learn more about 12L in the blog post.
Android 12 enabled developers to take advantage
of a range of new experiences, from people-centric UI
to stronger user protection.
Check out the following post to learn
about what's new in Android 12.
Zongmin talked about text recognition V2
and pose detection, recently released features in ML Kit.
These advanced turnkey APIs are built
on top of best-in-class models and pipelines.
You'll learn what's behind these APIs
to help you understand on-device machine learning basics
and how to make their usage more efficient.
Research shows us that when users get a new device,
they are frustrated if they have to sign
into their favorite apps again and are even more
disappointed if they lose data.
For app developers, this can mean lower user retention
and poor Play store ratings.
In this talk, Martin and Ruslan explore the benefits
of transferring users' data to a device using
Backup and Restore to achieve that
in a simple and secure way.
They also looked at the interesting new capabilities
and significant changes introduced to Backup
and Restore in Android 12.
Kseniia and Slava covered new Android 12 features
and changes.
They shared tools and techniques to ensure
that apps are compatible with the next Android release,
and users can take advantage of new features along with success
stories from app developers.
Learn principles to craft great experiences for novice internet
users from Mrinal and Amrit.
They highlighted the gap between nascent and tech-savvy user
segments, suggesting strategies to improve the overall user
experience.
Factors like low, functional literacy,
being multilingual by default, being less digitally confident,
and having no prior internet experience
brings the need to rethink the way
we build apps for these users.
That's it for this time with privacy and security,
large screens, and Android 12L.
Come back next week for the second installment
from the Android Developer Summit.
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