Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Global Developer Marketing
The Indie Games Festival shines a spotlight on some of the best games on Google Play, and celebrates the passion and creativity that small games studios bring to gamers worldwide. This year we are hosting Festival in South Korea, Japan and Europe, for local developers and gamers from all over the world.
Earlier this summer, we opened submissions, and today we’re revealing the finalists. Scroll down to see the shortlisted games!
Join the finals
September 3rd will be a jam packed day for indie games fans. Everyone is invited to attend the finals for the three Festivals, starting with South Korea at 2pm KST, followed shortly after by Japan at 3pm JST, and wrapping up with Europe at 11am CET.
The finals will be held in a custom virtual world where you can meet the people behind the finalist games, explore the titles, have fun with gamers from around the world, and be the first to discover the winners.
At the European finals we will also reveal the class of 2022 of the Indie Games Accelerator, a program that helps small game studios take their game to the next level by providing them training and mentorship.
Without further ado, please meet the finalists and join us in congratulating them!
More about the Indie Games Festival and the Indie Games Accelerator
At Google Play we’re committed to helping developers of all sizes succeed on our platform. Programs like the Festival and the Accelerator are here to help small games studios:
Festival | Promotions & prizes that put your game in the spotlight: This contest is your chance to showcase your game to industry experts and players worldwide, and win prizes that will celebrate your art and promote your game.
Accelerator | Training and mentorship to supercharge your growth: Over a period of 10 weeks, you will get tailored online training sessions and mentorship from industry and Google experts to help you polish your game and scale with Google Play.
Posted by Jason Tang, Product Management, Diego Zuluaga, Developer Relations, and Michael Mauzy, Developer Documentation
Since we introduced gesture navigation in Android 10, users have signaled they want to understand where a back gesture will take them before they complete it.
As the first step to addressing this need, we've been developing a predictive back gesture. When a user starts their gesture by swiping back, we’ll show an animated preview of the destination UI, and the user can complete the gesture to navigate to that UI if they want – as shown in the following example.
Although the predictive back gesture won’t be visible to users in Android 13, we’re making an early version of the UI available as a developer option for testing starting in Beta 4. We plan to make the UI available to users in a future Android release, and we’d like all apps to be ready. We’re also working with partners to ensure it’s consistent across devices.
Read on for details on how to try out the new gesture and support it in your apps. Adding support for predictive back gesture is straightforward for most apps, and you can get started today.
To try out the early version of the predictive back gesture available through the developer option, you’ll need to first update your app to support the predictive back gesture, and then enable the developer option.
Update your app to support predictive back gesture
To help make predictive back gesture helpful and consistent for users, we're moving to an ahead-of-time model for back event handling by adding new APIs and deprecating existing APIs.
The new platform APIs and updates to AndroidX Activity 1.6+ are designed to make your transition from unsupported APIs (KeyEvent#KEYCODE_BACK and OnBackPressed) to the predictive back gesture as smooth as possible.
You can start testing this feature in two to four steps, depending on your existing implementation.
To begin testing this feature:
1. Upgrade to AndroidX Activity 1.6.0-alpha05. By upgrading your dependency on AndroidX Activity, APIs that are already using the OnBackPressedDispatcherAPIs such as Fragments and the Navigation Component will seamlessly work when you opt-in for the predictive back gesture.
// In your build.gradle file: dependencies {
// Add this in addition to your other dependencies implementation "androidx.activity:activity:1.6.0-alpha05"
2. Opt-in for the predictive back gesture. Opt-in your app by setting the EnableOnBackInvokedCallback flag to true at the application level in the AndroidManifest.xml.
<application
...
android:enableOnBackInvokedCallback="true"
... >
...
</application>
If your app doesn’t intercept the back event, you're done at this step.
Note:Opt-in is optional in Android 13, and it will be ignored after this version.
3. Create a callback to intercept the system Back button/event. If possible, we recommend using the AndroidX APIs as shown below. For non-AndroidX use cases, check the platform API mentioned above.
This snippet implements handleOnBackPressed and adds the OnBackPressedCallback to the OnBackPressedDispatcher at the activity level.
val onBackPressedCallback = object: OnBackPressedCallback(true) {
overridefun handleOnBackPressed() {
// Your business logic to handle the back pressed event
}
}
requireActivity().onBackPressedDispatcher
.addCallback(onBackPressedCallback)
4. When your app is ready to stop intercepting the system Back event, disable the onBackPressedCallback callback.
Note:Your app may require using the platform APIs (OnBackInvokedCallback and OnBackPressedDispatcher) to implement the predictive back gesture. Read our documentation for details.
Enable the developer option to test the predictive back gesture
Once you’ve updated your app to support the predictive back gesture, you can enable a developer option (supported in Android 13 Beta 4 and higher) to see it for yourself.
To test this animation, complete the following steps:
On your device, go to Settings > System > Developer options.
Select Predictive back animations.
Launch your updated app, and use the back gesture to see it in action.
If you need a refresher on system back and predictive back gesture on Android, we recommend watching Basics for System Back.
Thank you again for all the feedback and being a part of the Android Community - we love collaborating together to provide the best experience for our users.
Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer
Today, we’re releasing version 1.2 of Jetpack Compose, Android's modern, native UI toolkit, continuing to build out our roadmap. This release contains new features like downloadable fonts, lazy grids, and improvements for tablets and Chrome OS with better focus, mouse, and input handling.
Compose is our recommended way to build new Android apps for phone, tablets and foldables. Today we also released Compose for Wear OS 1.0 - making Compose the best way to build a Wear OS app as well.
“Compose increased our productivity dramatically. It’s much easier and faster to write a Composable function than to create a custom view, and it’s also made it much easier to fulfill our designers’ requirements.”
Compose 1.2 includes a number of updates for Compose on Phones, Tablets and Foldables - it contains new stable APIs graduated from being experimental, and supports newer versions of Kotlin. We've already updated our samples, codelabs, Accompanist library and MDC-Android Compose Theme Adapter to work with Compose 1.2.
Note: Updating the Compose Compiler library to 1.2 requires using Kotlin 1.7.0. From this point forward the Compiler releases will be decoupled from the releases of other Compose libraries. Read more about the rationale for this in our blog post on independent versioning of Jetpack Compose libraries.
New stable features and APIs
Several features and APIs were added as stable. Highlights include:
The APIs LazyHorizontalGrid and LazyVerticalGrid let you place lists of items in a grid. These APIs already existed in Compose 1.1 but were marked as @Experimental.
We’re continuing to bring new features to Compose. Here are a few highlights:
Create your own custom efficient scrollable layouts with LazyLayout. Add custom overscroll effects to your scrollable container using Modifier.overscroll.
Improved test APIs. For example, the performKeyInput action mimics keyboard input in your tests. The new testTagsAsResourceId semantics property allows integration with UI Automator.
Make the back button behavior in TextField identical to the behavior in EditText.
We’re grateful for all of the bug reports and feature requests submitted to our issue tracker - they help us to improve Compose and build the APIs you need. Do continue providing your feedback and help us make Compose better!
Wondering what’s next? Check out our updated roadmap to see the features we’re currently thinking about and working on, such as animations for lazy item additions and removals, flow layouts, text editing improvements and more!
Jetpack Compose continues to evolve with the features you’ve been asking for. We’ve been thrilled to see tens of thousands of apps using Jetpack Compose in production already, and many of you shared how it’s improved your app development. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build next!
Today we’re launching version 1.0 of Compose for Wear OS, the first stable release of our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to help developers create beautiful, responsive apps for Google’s smartwatch platform.
Compose for Wear OS was built from the bottom up in Kotlin with assumptions of modern app architecture. It makes building apps for Wear OS easier, faster, and more intuitive by following the declarative approach and offering powerful Kotlin syntax.
The toolkit not only simplifies UI development, but also provides a rich set of UI components optimized for the watch experience with built-in support of Material design for Wear OS, and it’s accompanied by many powerful tools in Android Studio to streamline UI iteration.
What this means
The Compose for Wear OS 1.0 release means that the API is stable and has what you need to build production-ready apps. Moving forward, Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building user interfaces for Wear OS apps.
Your feedback has helped shape the development of Compose for Wear OS; our developer community has been with us each step of the way, engaging with us on Slack and providing feedback on the APIs, components, and tooling. As we are working on bringing new features to future versions of Compose for Wear OS, we will continue to welcome developer feedback and suggestions.
We are also excited to share how developers have already adopted Compose in their Wear OS apps and what they like about it.
What developers are saying
Todoist helps people organize, plan and collaborate on projects. They are one of the first companies to completely rebuild their Wear OS app using Compose and redesign all screens and interactions:
“When the new Wear design language and Compose for Wear OS were announced, we were thrilled. It gave us new motivation and opportunity to invest into the platform.”
Todoist application
Relying on Compose for Wear OS has improved both developer and user experience for Todoist:
“Compose for Wear OS helped us tremendously both on the development side and the design side. The guides and documentation made it easy for our product designers to prepare mockups matching the new design language of the platform. And the libraries made it very easy for us to implement these, providing all the necessary widgets and customizations. Swipe to dismiss, TimeText, ScalingLazyList were all components that worked very well out-of-the-box for us, while still allowing us to make a recognizable and distinct app.”
Outdooractive helps people plan routes for hiking, cycling, running, and other outdoor adventures. As wearables are a key aspect of their product strategy, they have been quick to update their offering with an app for the user's wrist.
Outdooractive application
Outdooractive has already embraced Wear OS 3, and by migrating to Compose for Wear OS they aimed for developer-side benefits such as having a modern code base and increased development productivity:
“Huge improvement is how lists are created. Thanks to ScalingLazyColumn it is easier (compared to RecyclerView) to create scrolling screens without wasting resources. Availability of standard components like Chip helps saving time by being able to use pre-fabricated design-/view-components. What would have taken us days now takes us hours.”
The Outdooractive team also highlighted that Compose for Wear OS usage help them to strive for better app quality:
“Improved animations were a nice surprise, allowing smoothly hiding/revealing components by just wrapping components in “AnimatedVisibility” for example, which we used in places where we would normally not have invested any time in implementing animations.”
Another developer we’ve been working with, Period Tracker helps keep track of period cycles, ovulation, and the chance of conception.
Period Tracker application
They have taken advantage of our UI toolkit to significantly improve user interface and quickly develop new features available exclusively on Wear OS:
“Compose for Wear OS provided us with many kits to help us bring our designs to life. For example, we used Chips to design the main buttons for period recording, water drinking, and taking medication, and it also helped us create a unique look for the latest version of Kegel workout.”
Similarly to other developers, Period Tracker noted that Compose for Wear OS helped them to achieve better developer experience and improved collaboration with design and development teams:
“For example, before Chips components were available, we had to use a custom way to load images on buttons which caused a lot of adaptation work. Yes, Compose for Wear OS improved our productivity and made our designers more willing to design a better user experience on wearables.”
Check out the in-depth case studies to learn more about how other developers are using Jetpack Compose.
1.0 release
Let’s look into the key features available with 1.0 release:
Material: The Compose Material catalog for Wear OS already offers more components than are available with View-based layouts. The components follow material styling and also implement material theming, which allows you to customize the design for your brand.
Declarative: Compose for Wear OS leverages Modern Android Development and works seamlessly with other Jetpack libraries. Compose-based UIs in most cases result in less code and accelerate the development process as a whole, read more.
Interoperable: If you have an existing Wear OS app with a large View-based codebase, it's possible to gradually adopt Compose for Wear OS by using the Compose Interoperability APIs rather than having to rewrite the whole codebase.
Handles different watch shapes: Compose for Wear OS extends the foundation of Compose, adding a DSL for all curved elements to make it easy to develop for all Wear OS device shapes: round, square, or rectangular with minimal code.
Performance: Each Compose for Wear OS library ships with its own baseline profiles that are automatically merged and distributed with your app’s APK and are compiled ahead of time on device. In most cases, this achieves app performance for production builds that is on-par with View-based apps. However, it’s important to know how to configure, develop, and test your app’s performance for the best results. Learn more.
Note that using version 1.0 of Compose for Wear OS requires using the version 1.2 of androidx.compose libraries and therefore Kotlin 1.7.0. Read more about Jetpack Compose 1.2 release here.
Tools and libraries
Android Studio
The declarative paradigm shift also alters the development workflow. The Compose tooling available in Android Studio will help you build apps more productively.
Android Studio Dolphin includes a new project template with Compose for Wear OS to help you get started.
The Composable Preview annotation allows you to instantly verify how your app’s layout behaves on different watch shapes and sizes. You can configure the device preview to show different Wear OS device types (round, rectangle, etc):
importandroidx.compose.ui.tooling.preview
@Preview(
device=Devices.WEAR_OS_LARGE_ROUND,
showSystemUi=true,
backgroundColor=0xff000000,
showBackground=true
)
@Composable
funPreviewCustomComposable() {
CustomComposable(...)
}
Starting with Android Studio Electric Eel, Live Edit supports iterative code development for Wear OS, providing quick feedback as you make changes in the editor and immediately reflecting UI in the Preview or running app on the device.
Horologist
Horologist is a group of open-source libraries from Google that supplement Wear OS development, which we announced with the beta release of Compose for Wear OS. Horologist has graduated a number of experimental APIs to stable including TimeText fadeAway modifiers, WearNavScaffold, the Date and Time pickers.
Date and Time pickers from Horologist library
Learning Compose
If you are unfamiliar with using Jetpack Compose, we recommend starting with the tutorial. Many of the development principles there also apply to Compose for Wear OS.
To learn more about Compose for Wear OS check out:
Posted by Purnima Kochikar, VP of Partnerships, Google Play
This week we are celebrating ten years of Google Play. Over the past decade, your creativity combined with our investment in a global platform has created a thriving app ecosystem. 2.5 billion people in over 190 countries visit Play every month to connect with your apps and games, and Play has generated over $120 billion in earnings for developers to date. We’re so proud of this amazing milestone, and grateful for your partnership.
Looking back
I joined the team in 2012, only a few months after Google Play launched. At that time, active users on Android had just grown from 100 million to 400 million. Android was the new kid on the block, with the audacious goal of making mobile computing accessible to everyone, everywhere. You were understandably skeptical about our chances for success - we were so far behind competing platforms in most aspects, from platform features and tools to design guidelines and commercial capabilities. Our belief in the immense potential of a fair and open ecosystem - and, even more importantly, our belief in your limitless potential - made us push forward. We were and continue to be driven by our commitment to your success.
Back then, our tiny partnerships team of just six people was figuring out how we could best support you in navigating the opportunities and challenges of the mobile economy. There were so many uncertainties: would we be able to deliver the apps you were envisioning to a global audience on devices they can afford? Would people watch videos on the small smartphone screens, given the high cost of mobile data and low device capabilities? Would they be happy paying for mobile games, and feel safe doing so? Would people subscribe to in-app content in the same way that they did to physical goods like magazines and newspapers?
We were with you every step of the way, taking the time to understand your needs and find ways to help you build beautiful apps and games. We also invited our global community of users to help us evolve your apps and games together, supported by features like beta testing and staged rollouts, and the ability to reply to user reviews.
Some of my fondest memories from those early days are of working with companies who inspired us by dreaming up novel ways to harness the magic of mobile phones. They broadened our perspective of what is possible. Smule is one of those early partners who kicked off their success in the first couple of years of Play. They became one of the first of many to inspire my team, and share their story with the community:
As your apps gained traction and you aspired to convert them into sustainable global businesses, we bolstered our investments in our commerce platform to help you grow and manage your business. We added the most popular and effective forms of payment from around the world to ensure people could pay for your apps and games frictionlessly. We removed complexities associated with finding and integrating local payment, including access to 300+ local payment methods supported in 70 countries. We also evolved our platform to anticipate and support your business needs - going from premium to free-to-play and subscriptions business models - and now Google Play helps consumers transact safely and seamlessly in more than 170 markets.
We provided industry leading insights through our Play Console on the entire lifecycle of your app, from installs to Vitals and more, to help you manage your business effectively. I remember my entire team tearing up when Vincenzo Colucci, the founder of Smart Launcher, described how Play enabled him to live where he wanted to live - in Manfredonia, in the South of Italy, with his loved ones - and do what he loves to do - build apps that impact people around the world. His company also turned 10 years old this year.
At every step, you demanded more from us and inspired us to think more expansively. In response, our product and engineering teams built tools and capabilities that could support all the great things that you were doing. Your feedback has helped to shape the launch of new features, resources and programs to support your success on the platform. With your help, we have evolved:
We’ve also worked in partnership with several of you to create new features that would benefit the entire ecosystem. For example, in 2015, we worked with Supercell to help prevent fraud, leading to the launch of the Voided Purchases API, which drove industry-wide improvements to fraud and refund abuse. Similarly, our Japanese and Korean partners like GungHo Online Entertainment and NCSOFT helped us grow from a platform that supported pay-and-download games, like Rovio’s early Angry Birds, to becoming a LiveOps platform that supports games as a live service. Our media partners helped us evolve our subscriptions platform to include features such as Account Hold and Grace Period. Interestingly, we used these features to help our sports apps partners to hold on to their subscribers when the world went into lockdown.
While there are countless such examples in our decade-long partnerships, here are 10 of our most memorable launches from the last 10 years:
As your businesses matured, we invested in product capabilities such as Play Points to help you retain and re-engage your most loyal users. We are so proud that this program has over 100 million members in 28 countries, with further expansion scheduled for later this year. We also created a consulting service to provide business and technical insights to help you make more data driven decisions about your product roadmap and global expansion plans. You have told us that these insights have helped to drive millions in incremental revenues for you, and informed not only your product direction, but also your M&A strategies.
Above all, our partnership has brought meaningful apps and games to global audiences, and built successful businesses that have created new jobs and helped local economies. In the US alone, Play and Android have helped to create more than 2M jobs. We are truly proud of the economic impact we have had together on local communities and small businesses around the world.
Looking forward
As we look towards our next decade, it is useful to pause and reflect on the last two unprecedented years we have experienced together, and the overwhelmingly positive impact our partnership has had on the lives of so many people. Android and Play - powered by your businesses - have connected families and loved ones together, helped to keep people safe by supporting daily needs, sped up access to telemedicine, created employment, and enabled kids to learn and grow. Let’s take a moment to let that sink in.
These years have taught us important lessons about our joint responsibility to foster a safe and trusted ecosystem, and how much more needs to be done to make mobile accessible to everyone. As we think about the future, there are three areas which are top of mind of us:
Continuing to evolve our tools to support your business decision making, evolve our business models, and to help you safely grow your businesses and deliver the best quality experiences for your users in the evolving privacy and security landscape.
Building an ecosystem for everyone by investing in initiatives that improve representation in the apps and games industry, and by empowering more underrepresented founders to build successful businesses. Last year we moved beyond a “one size fits all” service fee model to ensure all types of businesses can be successful, and we will continue to have multiple programs designed to support our diverse app ecosystem.
The success of the founders who have gone through our Indie Game Festival and Accelerator programs, and the meaningful impact of our Change the Game initiative and of our accessibility efforts, make us optimistic about our ecosystem. We look forward to the next decade where we welcome many more founders like nine year old Alyssa and her mother who created Frobelles, a dress-up game increasing representation of African and Caribbean hair styles, to our #WeArePlay family.
Thank you for being an integral part of our audacious goal to make mobile accessible to everyone, everywhere. We have come a long way and we have a long way to go. We are inspired by and grateful for each one of you, and remain singularly committed to your success. We can’t wait to see what you will create next, and the new horizons you will drive us to explore and enable.
We’re back with more #WeArePlay stories to celebrate you: the global community of people behind apps and games businesses.
Following last week’s “virtual roadtrip” of all of the US, today we’re kicking off with Melissa from Greenville, South Carolina. She’s on a mission to make the world a more pet-friendly place. Her app, BringFido, helps people find somewhere to stay, eat or visit with their furry friends. In this film you will meet her, her dogs Ace and Roxy, and hear how she went from idea, to website, to growing app and thriving business.
This week we are also introducing you to game founders from other parts of the world:
Arnaud, an AI-enthusiast from Chartres in France, who founded Elokence. This 12-people team created Akinator, which has been downloaded over 260 million times on Google Play.
Daigo, a creative indie from Japan, founder of Odencat, whose games have won multiple accolades.
Keerti and Kashyap, a cricket-loving couple from Hyderabad in India, who used their life savings to start Hitwicket Cricket Games. Millions of fans worldwide enjoy their games.
Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay and stay tuned for even more coming soon.
We’re back with more #WeArePlay stories to celebrate you: the global community of people behind apps and games businesses.
Following last week’s “virtual roadtrip” of all of the US, today we’re kicking off with Melissa from Greenville, South Carolina. She’s on a mission to make the world a more pet-friendly place. Her app, BringFido, helps people find somewhere to stay, eat or visit with their furry friends. In this film you will meet her, her dogs Ace and Roxy, and hear how she went from idea, to website, to growing app and thriving business.
This week we are also introducing you to game founders from other parts of the world:
Arnaud, an AI-enthusiast from Chartres in France, who founded Elokence. This 12-people team created Akinator, which has been downloaded over 260 million times on Google Play.
Daigo, a creative indie from Japan, founder of Odencat, whose games have won multiple accolades.
Keerti and Kashyap, a cricket-loving couple from Hyderabad in India, who used their life savings to start Hitwicket Cricket Games. Millions of fans worldwide enjoy their games.
Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay and stay tuned for even more coming soon.
Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations
We’re just a few weeks away from the official release of Android 13! As we put the finishing touches on the next version of Android, today we’re bringing you Beta 4, a final update for your testing and development. Now is the time to make sure your apps are ready!
There’s a lot to explore in Android 13, from privacy features like the new notification permission and photo picker, to productivity features like themed app icons and per-app language support, as well as modern standards like HDR video, Bluetooth LE Audio, and MIDI 2.0 over USB. We’ve also extended the updates we made in 12L, giving you better tools to take advantage of tablet and large screen devices.
You can try Beta 4 today on your Pixel device by enrolling here for over-the-air updates. If you previously enrolled, you’ll automatically get today’s update. You can also get Android 13 Beta on select devices from several of our partners. Visit the Android 13 developer site for details.
Watch for more information on the official Android 13 release coming soon!
What’s in Beta 4?
Today’s update includes a release candidate build of Android 13 for Pixel devices and the Android Emulator. We reached Platform Stability at Beta 3, so all app-facing surfaces are final, including SDK and NDK APIs, app-facing system behaviors, and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces. With these and the latest fixes and optimizations, Beta 4 gives you everything you need to complete your testing.
Get your apps ready!
With the official Android 13 release just ahead, we’re asking all app and game developers to complete your final compatibility testing and publish your compatibility updates ahead of the final release. For SDK, library, tools, and game engine developers, it’s important to release your compatible updates as soon as possible -- your downstream app and game developers may be blocked until they receive your updates.
To test your app for compatibility, just install it on a device running Android 13 Beta 4 and work through the app flows, looking for any functional or UI issues. Review the Android 13 behavior changes for all apps to focus on areas where your app could be affected. Here are some of the top changes to test:
Runtime permission for notifications - Android 13 introduces a new runtime permission for sending notifications from an app. Make sure you understand how the new permission works, and plan on targeting Android 13 (API 33) as soon as possible. More here.
Clipboard preview - Make sure your app hides sensitive data in Android 13’s new clipboard preview, such as passwords or credit card information. More here.
JobScheduler prefetch - JobScheduler now tries to anticipate the next time your app will be launched and will run any associated prefetch jobs ahead of that time. If you use prefetch jobs, test that they are working as expected. More here.
Remember to test the libraries and SDKs in your app for compatibility. If you find any SDK issues, try updating to the latest version of the SDK or reaching out to the developer for help.
Android 13 builds on the tablet optimizations introduced in 12L, so as part of your testing, make sure your apps look their best on tablets and other large-screen devices. You can test large-screen features by setting up an Android emulator in Android Studio, or you can use a large screen device from our Android 13 Beta partners. Here are some areas to watch for:
Taskbar interaction - Check how your app responds when viewed with the new taskbar on large screens. Make sure your app's UI isn't cut off or blocked by the taskbar. More here.
Multi-window mode - Multi-window mode is now enabled by default for all apps, regardless of app configuration, so make sure the app handles split-screen appropriately. You can test by dragging and dropping your app into split-screen mode and adjusting the window size. More here.
Improved compatibility experience - if your app isn’t optimized for tablets yet, such as using a fixed orientation or not being resizable, check how your app responds to compatibility mode adjustments such as letterboxing. More here.
Media projection - If your app uses media projection, check how your app responds while playing back, streaming, or casting media on large screens. Be sure to account for device posture changes on foldable devices as well. More here.
Camera preview - For camera apps, check how your camera preview UI responds on large screens when your app is constrained to a portion of the screen in multi-window or split-screen mode. Also check how your app responds when a foldable device's posture changes. More here.
You can read more about the tablet features in Android 13 and what to test here.
Get started with Android 13
Today’s Beta 4 release has everything you need to test your app and try the Android 13 features. Just enroll your Pixel device to get the update over-the-air. To get started, set up the Android 13 SDK.
You can also test your app with Android 13 Beta on devices from several of our partners. Visit android.com/beta to see the full list of partners, with links to their sites for details on their supported devices and Beta builds, starting with Beta 1. Each partner will handle their own enrollments and support, and provide the Beta updates to you directly. For even broader testing, you can try Beta 4 on Android GSI images, and if you don’t have a device, you can test on the Android Emulator. For complete details on Android 13, visit the Android 13 developer site.
A huge thank you to our developer community for helping shape the Android 13 release! You’ve given us thousands of bug reports and shared insights that have helped us optimize APIs, improve features, fix significant bugs, and in general make the platform better for users and developers.
We’re looking forward to seeing your apps on Android 13!
Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer
Starting today, the various Jetpack Compose libraries will move to independent versioning schemes. This creates the possibility for sub-groups such as androidx.compose.compiler or androidx.compose.animation to follow their own release cycles.
Allowing these libraries to be versioned independently will decouple dependencies which were previously implicitly coupled, thereby making it easier to incrementally upgrade your application and therefore stay up-to-date with the latest Compose features.
The first library to break away from the single Compose version is the Compose Compiler. Today we’re releasing the 1.2.0 stable version that brings support for Kotlin 1.7.0! The release is both backwards and forwards compatible with the Compose UI libraries and the Compose Runtime library. This means you can upgrade your Compose Compiler to 1.2.0 stable and use Kotlin 1.7.0, while leaving your other Compose libraries on their current version, for example 1.1.0 stable.
To upgrade the version of the Compose Compiler in your app, specify the kotlinCompilerExtensionVersion in your build.gradle file.
Compose and Kotlin are highly coupled, and we’ve heard your feedback that Compose compiler updates are needed to allow you to upgrade your Kotlin version. We want to make sure that you can use the latest and greatest features (and bug fixes) from both Compose and Kotlin, which is why we plan to release stable versions of the Compose Compiler on a much more regular basis. This means the Compose Compiler version numbers will progress at a faster pace than most other Compose libraries. Since the Compose Compiler is both forwards and backwards compatible, you will be able to upgrade it as soon as a new version is released.
The Compose Compiler is built as a Kotlin Compiler Plugin, and so you must use a version of the Compose Compiler which is compatible with the version of Kotlin that you have chosen. To help you choose the version that matches your project, check out the Compose-Kotlin compatibility map.
Moving the Compiler library to a different versioning scheme is the first step in decoupling versioning for the different Compose library groups. You’ll see new stable releases for the other Compose libraries in the next few weeks, and then they will then start following their own release cycles independent of the Compose Compiler.
Prepare your build for individual versioning and start using the latest Compose Compiler and Kotlin versions now!
We look forward to seeing what you build with Compose!
Posted by Sachiyo Sugimoto, Android Partner Engineering
A strength of Android is its diverse ecosystem of devices, brought to market by more than 24K distinct devices, and used by billions of people around the world. Since the early releases of Android, we’ve invested in our Android Compatibility Program as a way to ensure that devices continue to provide a stable, consistent environment for apps.
The Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) is a key part of the program - it is a collection of more than two million test cases that check Android device implementations to ensure developer applications run on a variety of devices and enable a consistent application experience for users.
Device makers run CTS on their devices throughout the development process, and use it to identify and fix bugs early. Over the years we have constantly expanded the suite by adding new test cases, and today CTS includes more than 2 million tests. It is still growing - as Android evolves, there are new areas to cover and there are also gaps where we are constantly working to create additional tests.
While most CTS tests are written by Android engineers, we know that app developers have a unique perspective on actual device compatibility issues. So to enhance CTS with better input from app developers, we are adding a new test suite called CTS-D that is built and run by developers like you.
What is CTS-D?
CTS-D is a new CTS module that is powered by app developers with a focus on pain points that they are seeing in the field. Developers can build and contribute test cases to CTS-D to help catch those issues, and they can run the CTS-D suite to verify compatibility. Longer term, our plan is to work closely with the Android developer community to expand the CTS-D suite.
We know that many of you have already created your own tests to verify compatibility on various devices. We want to work with you to bring those tests into AOSP, and you can see the first tests contributed by the community in the initial CTS-D commit here.
So with CTS-D, we are helping to make those kinds of tests available widely, to help device manufacturers and app developers identify and share issues more effectively.
How is CTS-D used?
CTS-D is open-sourced and available on AOSP, so any app developer can use it as a verification tool. Using CTS-D helps to minimize the communication overhead among app developers, device manufacturers and Google, helping to resolve issues effectively.
If a certain device does not pass a CTS-D test, please report the problem using this issue tracker template. After we verify the issue on the reported device, we will work with our partners to resolve it. We're also strongly advising device manufacturers to use CTS-D to discover and mitigate issues.
Get Started with CTS-D!
If you have an idea for CTS-D, please file a test proposal using this issue tracker template before contributing your test code to AOSP. The Android team will review your proposal and verify your test’s eligibility. We’re currently most interested in adding more test cases in the area of Power Management.
Just like with CTS, new CTS-D test cases must meet eligibility requirements and can only enforce the following:
Test cases that have not been covered by existing CTS test cases in AOSP
If you are interested in learning more about CTS-D, check out tutorials here on how to contribute to and utilize CTS-D. Note that the review process for new CTS-D test cases can take some time, so thanks for your patience. We hope you will give CTS-D a try soon. Let’s collaboratively make the Android experience even better!
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