What’s new for Android Developer?

An Android developer is in charge of developing applications for devices powered by the Android operating system. They have a strong understanding of the patterns and practices that revolve around such platform. Moreover, they ensure the best possible performance, quality, and responsiveness of the application.

Each new version of Android includes a range of new features and improvements designed for Android in the enterprise. Whether you're developing a device policy controller or apps for managed Google Play, you can refer to review the new APIs, features, and behavior changes introduced in each version of Android.

Here are some important new features for Android developers -

Phone displays

Android and their partners have contemplated different screen sizes and densities, enabling the platform to power a broad category of form factors and new experiences like Android TV, Android Auto, Wear OS and even Android apps on Chromebooks. Phone screens are an area where Android partners set the bar, introducing "phablets" when phone screens were small.

Now Android device makers creating a new category: Foldables. Taking advantage of new flexible display technology, the screen can literally bend and fold. There are two variants broadly speaking: two-screen devices and one-screen devices. When folded, foldable looks like phones, fitting in your pocket or purse. When unfolded, their defining feature is what we call screen continuity. As you unfold, the app seamlessly transfers to the bigger screen without missing a beat.

Kotlin

Kotlin a first-class language on Android in 2017. Over 118,000 new projects using Kotlin started in Android Studio. It's become the fastest growing language in terms of growth of a number of contributors on GitHub and voted the #2 most loved language on Stack Overflow. The more developers use Kotlin, the higher their satisfaction.

Jetpack

Jetpack, the next generation of tools and Android APIs to accelerate Android application development. Jetpack builds on the foundations laid out by Support Library and Architecture. Already, 80% of top 1,000 apps and games are using one of the new Jetpack libraries in production. Android X - Jetpack evolution of the original Android Support Library - to public AOSP. This means you can see features and bug fixes implemented in real-time, and contribute to any of the Android X libraries.

Animation

Android 9 introduces the Animated Image Drawable class for drawing and displaying GIF and WebP animated images. Animated Image Drawable works similarly to AnimatedVectorDrawable in that the render thread drives the animations of Animated Image Drawable. The render thread also uses a worker thread to decode, so that decoding does not interfere with other operations on the render thread. This implementation allows your app to display an animated image without managing its updates or interfering with other events on your app's UI thread.

Lockdown apps

Starting in Android 9, device owners and profile owners (of secondary users) can lock any app to a device’s screen by putting the app into lock task mode. Previously, app developers had to add support for lock task mode in their apps. Android 9 also extends the lock task APIs to profile owners of non-affiliated secondary users.

HDR VP9 Video and HEIF image

Android 9 provides built-in support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) VP9 Profile 2, so you can deliver HDR-enabled movies to your users from YouTube, Play Movies, and other sources on HDR-capable devices. Android 9 also adds support for encoding images using the High-Efficiency Image File format (HEIF or HEIC), which improves compression and reduces storage space and network data usage. HEIF still image samples are supported in the MediaMuxer and MediaExtractor classes. With platform support on Android 9 devices, it's easy to send and utilize HEIF images from your backend server.

Android Things

Android Things is Google's managed OS that enables developers to build and maintain Internet of Things devices at scale. Four new System-on-Modules (SoMs) are now supported on the platform with guaranteed long-term support for three years and additional options for extended support, making it easier to go from prototypes to production. To make product development more seamless than ever, the accompanying Android Things Console is also ready for production. It helps developers easily manage and update their devices with the latest stability fixes and security updates provided by Google.

Slices

Slices are UI templates that display a rich array of dynamic, and interactive content from your app, across Android and within Google surfaces. Slices can include live-data, scrolling content, inline actions, and deep-linking into your app so users can do everything from playing music to checking reservation updates. Slices can also contain interactive controls like toggles and sliders. You can get started building Slices today, and they will begin appearing for users soon.

Android App Bundle

The Android App Bundle also enables modularization so that you can deliver features on-demand, instead of during install. You can build dynamic feature modules in the latest Android Studio canary release.

Neural Networks API

The Neural Networks API was introduced in Android 8.1 (API level 27) to accelerate on-device machine learning on Android. Android 9 expands and improves the API, adding support for nine new operations. The API also introduces a new function that allows you to specify whether to calculate ANEURALNETWORKS_TENSOR_FLOAT32 with a range and precision as low as that of the IEEE 754 16-bit floating-point format.

Android backups

Android 9 adds new functionality and developer options related to backup and restore. Android 9 adds support for encrypting Android backups with a client-side secret. This support is enabled automatically.

 

Photograph by rvlsoft