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Optimize your apps for the next generation of Samsung Galaxy devices

Posted by Fahd Imtiaz, Senior Product Manager and Miguel Montemayor, Developer Relations Engineer, Android Developer Experience



Today at Galaxy Unpacked, Samsung unveiled its latest lineup of foldable and wearable devices. For developers, this means that the variety of form factors, screen sizes, and device postures your app needs to support is expanding once again.

With devices like the Galaxy Z Fold8, the ecosystem is expanding to include hardware with a landscape-first natural orientation and a wider aspect ratio in its main display state. Whether a user is unfolding a large display, flipping open a cover screen, or glancing at their wrist, users expect a flawless experience. To help you meet this moment, we’re sharing actionable guidance and new tooling updates to enable you to build adaptively proactively.

Rethink layout architecture for dynamic displays, including ultra-wide foldables

Building for the latest foldables means dropping assumptions about display orientation and size. This is especially true for the Galaxy Z Fold8, which adopts an ultra-wide display, adding to the variety of aspect ratios to account for.  Devices with this landscape-first natural orientation show the limitations of hardcoded layout rules when users unfold the device. That’s why we’ve introduced dedicated guidance for building for landscape foldables and trifolds.


To build a responsive UI that handles these physics seamlessly, focus on the following core pillars:

  • Build fluid, adaptive layouts: Wide aspect ratios and compact vertical heights require fluid UIs that scale responsively. Our updated adaptive design guidance advises considering the window class width first to determine layout changes, then adjusting for height. To let individual components fluidly adapt to the grid, structure your layout using flexible containers that allow your content to automatically wrap, span, and reflow. For design inspiration browse our adaptive sample app and dual-screen design galleries.
  • Track actual app space: Your app's display space rarely matches the physical device size, especially on an ultra-wide screen during multi-window, split-screen, or multitasking states. Sometimes even the orientations differ. Leverage Window Size Classes using the Jetpack Window Manager library to calculate the exact space your app occupies.


  • Leverage the latest Jetpack Compose Update: Start by adopting the stable Jetpack Compose April '26 release (Compose BOM version 2026.04.01).Take advantage of the new structural layout tools to manage complex architectures. The new Grid API allows you to define dynamic tracks and column spans without the performance overhead of a lazy list. Pair Grid with the new FlexBox layout API to easily handle multi-axis alignment and dynamic item wrapping. You can also use the new MediaQuery API to adapt your UI to its environment, using conditions to detect signals like device posture, window size, and keyboard types. 
  • Make your app fold aware: Use the Jetpack WindowManager library, which provides an API surface for foldable device window features such as folds and hinges. When your app is fold aware, it can adapt its layout to avoid placing important content in the area of folds or hinges and use folds and hinges as natural separators.
  • Maintain app continuity: Avoid breaking the user journey when the device configuration shifts. Retain your UI state using ViewModel to ensure smooth transitions when a user folds or unfolds their device.

Ensure seamless camera capture on foldable devices

Camera implementation on foldables brings unique hardware quirks. Moving from a compact outer display to an expanded inner display introduces distinct layout aspect ratios while device rotation remains unchanged. If an app assumes a fixed portrait relationship between the camera sensor and the device layout, the app will likely suffer from sideways, stretched, or cropped previews during these folding transitions.
 
When optimizing your app's media pipeline, migrate your capture experiences to CameraX using the CameraX migration skill. The library’s PreviewView automatically handles sensor orientation, device rotation, and scaling behind the scenes. This guarantees a clean, stable preview regardless of how the user holds or positions the device. If you are maintaining an existing Camera2 codebase, integrate the CameraViewfinder library to apply these complex aspect ratio and rotation transformations automatically without needing a total architecture overhaul.

Extend glanceable interactions to Wear OS 7

The opportunity to build for this new generation of devices extends right to the wrist. Launching with Wear OS 7, Wear Widgets give you a fresh surface to provide users with instant, glanceable access to their essential updates. You can build these highly expressive experiences using Jetpack Glance and RemoteCompose. Crucially, Widgets built with this framework can now populate multi-widget tiles that were previously reserved for first-party widgets. 

Build intelligent features 

Gemini intelligence already completes tasks on users’ behalf, and you can experiment with the intelligence system by sharing your apps capabilities. 

Samsung’s new foldable devices come with Gemini Nano 4, our latest on-device model. Nano 4 provides support for over 140 languages, better multimodal understanding, and much more. Use ML Kit’s Prompt API with advanced features like structured output and thinking mode to build intelligent features on-device. 

Start optimizing today

The tools and frameworks are ready to help you optimize your app for all screen sizes. Begin by exploring our guidance for building adaptive apps to learn more about core adaptive design principles. 

To dive deeper, check out our comprehensive YouTube playlist. Finally, ensure your app delivers a flawless, premium experience on the newest form factors by reviewing our dedicated quality guidelines for trifolds and landscape foldables and WearOS. 

Unfold the future today! 

Google Meet now organizes your meeting notes, transcripts, and recordings in your Google Drive

We’re making it easier for users to find meeting notes, transcripts and recordings in Google Drive with the following improvements:

  • After a meeting, we’ll automatically upload these files to a new folder in the host’s My Drive called “Google Meet.”
  • Within that “Google Meet” folder, these files will be automatically organized into subfolders for each meeting. Files from different instances of a recurring meeting will share one folder.
  • Any meeting attendees with access to the meeting files will see shortcuts to these source files in their “Google Meet” Drive folders too..

Previously, these files were only uploaded to the host’s My Drive, not the attendees’, and the files weren’t organized by meeting.

Note: Shortly after we roll out this change, we’ll automatically move the existing “Meet Recordings” folder into the new “Google Meet” folder and rename it “Legacy Meet Recordings.” Users may see both “Meet Recordings” and “Google Meet” in their Google Drive for a brief period during this transition.


Getting started

  • Admins: Existing "Meet Recordings" folders will be renamed to "Legacy Meet Recordings" and moved under the new "Google Meet" folder topology. Admins should audit any API scripts or automated workflows that rely on specific folder names or IDs.
  • End users: Users will see their meeting artifacts automatically organized into meeting-specific sub-folders within the "Google Meet" folder, with shortcuts for easier findability.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers

Resources

Gemini Alpha is now Gemini Beta

We’re updating the name of the Gemini Alpha program to "Gemini Beta." This new name more accurately reflects both the scale and the quality of the features that enter this launch stage. Please note that this is solely a branding change. This update does not alter any customer configurations, data privacy constraints, or pricing tiers. All existing admin controls and customer opt-ins are fully preserved. Your current Terms of Service continue to apply, and customers do not need to re-sign any agreements.

As a reminder, we’ll continue to announce new Gemini Beta features in the Google Developer Program (GDP) forum and the Gemini Beta Help Center. You must be an active Workspace customer and register to access GDP content; follow these instructions to sign up.

Getting started

  • Admins: There is no change to existing admin controls. You will begin to see the "Gemini Beta" label replace "Gemini Alpha" in the Admin console and Help Center articles over the next several weeks.
  • End users: There is no end user setting for this change.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business: Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Education Add-ons: Google AI Pro for Education

Resources

Early Stable Update for Desktop

 The Stable channel has been updated to 151.0.7922.47/.48 for Windows and Mac as part of our early stable release to a small percentage of users. A full list of changes in this build is available in the log.

You can find more details about early Stable releases here.

Interested in switching release channels?  Find out how here. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.


Daniel Yip

Google Chrome

Chrome Beta for Desktop Update

The Beta channel has been updated to 151.0.7922.47 for Windows, Mac and Linux.

A partial list of changes is available in the Git log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.

Chrome Release Team
Google Chrome