Now in Android #78. Android 14 Developer Preview 2, Put on OS… | by Daniel Galpin | Android Builders | Mar, 2023

Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing information to what’s new and notable on this planet of Android growth.

Android 14 Developer Preview 2 is now out there, with extra enhancements to privateness, safety, efficiency, customization, and extra, together with:

• Chosen Images Entry permits Android 14 customers to grant partial entry to their media library if an app requests Android 13’s READ_MEDIA_IMAGES or READ_MEDIA_VIDEO permissions.
• Regional preferences allow customers to personalize temperature items, the primary day of the week, and numbering methods, and there are new APIs to entry these preferences.
• Most notifications containing FLAG_ONGOING_EVENT will likely be consumer dismissible on unlocked handheld units, so there will likely be fewer non-dismissable notifications.
• Seconds after an app goes into the cached state, background work is disallowed, and the method will cease getting CPU time. (That is an order of magnitude sooner than this occurs in Android 13.)

Right here is the tough timeline for the discharge milestones:

Obtain the most recent preview of Android Studio together with the Android 14 SDK and emulator photographs to get began. On choose Pixel units, you can too flash a system picture. Discover the new options and APIs and find out about conduct modifications which may have an effect on your app. Take a look at to see how nicely your app works on Android 14. Go to the suggestions web page to report a difficulty or submit a characteristic request.

We introduced upcoming coverage modifications to enhance each Put on OS app high quality and app presentation inside Google Play. As well as, WearOS apps should goal API degree 30 (Android 11) to proceed being discoverable for units that run Android 11+. The brand new necessities will come into impact on Google Play beginning August 31, 2023. Till then, the current insurance policies will likely be in place; the general obligatory Put on OS app evaluation course of stays unchanged.

Examples of those modifications embrace:

• Utilizing a black background for all apps and tiles.
• Displaying the time of day clearly on the high of the app dwelling display screen and any ongoing exercise screens.
• Dealing with ongoing actions accurately on the watch face, latest apps, and in tiles.

With cautious consideration of app design, optimum practical conduct, and Google Play experiences, we’re aiming to enhance app high quality and discoverability of high quality apps throughout the Put on OS ecosystem.

The total Android Fundamentals with Compose course is now out there. Whether or not you’re a newbie with no programming expertise, or a developer seeking to be taught Jetpack Compose whereas brushing up on Android growth expertise and Kotlin, it’s a good time to start out studying.

This course covers how you can create Android apps utilizing Jetpack Compose, Android’s really helpful fashionable toolkit that simplifies and accelerates Android UI growth, exploring fundamentals of the Kotlin programming language, Android app structure, and generally used Jetpack libraries alongside the best way. It even has a unit on Views-Compose interoperability so you may apply your Compose expertise when you’re engaged on an current app constructed with the legacy View-based UI toolkit.

In Bringing one of the best of Chrome to Android builders and customers, we coated how Chrome now offers you extra management over tab top with Partial Customized Tabs. You’ll be able to customise the tab in pixels for a partial overlay, permitting customers to concurrently work together together with your native app and the online.

In API desugaring supporting Android 13 and java.nio, we introduced the discharge of a brand new model of API desugaring based mostly on Android 13 and Java 11 language APIs, permitting you to make use of java.nio APIs regardless of which Android model is on the consumer’s gadget. Along with supporting java.nio, API desugaring of java.time and java.util.stream has been up to date to assist APIs added as much as Android 13.

Lastly, in Allow subsequent technology IDs for higher Play Video games Providers assist for all Google accounts, we coated how Play Video games Providers (PGS) is introducing subsequent technology Participant IDs for brand new gamers, a developer participant key, and higher Play Video games Providers assist for all accounts, together with these below supervision.

We continued the MAD Expertise collection centered on Jetpack Compose structure and modifiers with one new episode on Superior Format ideas. On this episode, Simona covers how you can deal with extra advanced structure necessities, harnessing the ability of Format section and constraints to construct customized layouts in Compose.

When you have any questions so removed from this collection on Jetpack Compose Layouts and Modifiers, we could have a dwell Q&A session on March ninth. Depart a touch upon the weblog posts, on YouTube, or utilizing #MADCompose on Twitter to ask your questions.

It’s been fairly quiet on this planet of AndroidX releases since our earlier episode:

• Automotive App 1.4 alpha 1 provides high degree actions to GridTemplate and ListTemplate that present up as a Floating Motion Button in addition to a number of different issues corresponding to extras to hyperlink a media merchandise’s subtitle or description to different media gadgets.
• Concurrent 1.2 alpha 1 now has correct nullability annotations.
• Core-splashscreen 1.1 alpha 1 fixes a null pointer exception when SplashScreenView#getIconView returned null.

Roberto covers how you can Leverage Multi-Window and Exercise Embedding to assist your customers multitask and benefit of elevated display screen actual property by launching Actions from different apps side-by-side with yours, utilizing exercise embedding to make an exercise from one other app seem like a part of your app, and how you can allow different apps to embed one in all your Actions.

Tomáš illustrates how you can go about Accessing Composables from UiAutomator, leveraging Modifier.testTag() in Jetpack Compose.

Function Engineering within the Google Play Retailer takes a peek into what it takes to design the serving infrastructure of Google Play from the angle of characteristic engineering. It covers how they outline success, challenges within the characteristic engineering infrastructure, and guiding ideas that assist them succeed.

In Retailer & retrieve information securely with Block Retailer, Luke covers a brand new key worth pair characteristic on Block Retailer that permits you to save as much as 64 instances extra information, together with the flexibility to pair binary packets with a key. Block Retailer saves and restores session information to assist create seamless sign-in experiences for current customers of your utility. (and it helps end-to-end encryption)

Thomas coated TensorFlow Lite with Google Play providers, Android’s official ML inference engine that has been launched to steady since final September. It might probably assist cut back your app measurement by as much as 5MB whereas ensuring your app is up to date with the most recent steady model of TensorFlow Lite, and Thomas particulars how you can use it in your app, together with the GPU delegate.

in Introduction to drawing in Compose, Rebecca covers how you can do customized drawing in Jetpack Compose, together with DrawScope, drawing modifiers, understanding the coordinate system, DrawScope transformations corresponding to scale, translate, rotate, and inset, and how you can use all of this to attract a stuffed, smoothed, animated path.

In Episode 195 of the Android Builders Backstage podcast, Chet and Romain discuss to Jeff and Anton from the Mainline crew about modular system parts, and the brand new SDK extension framework which helps you to entry them.