Category Archives: Android Developers Blog

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Learn Jetpack Compose at a Compose Camp near you!

Posted by Kat Kuan, Developer Relations Engineer, Android

 Jetpack Compose is Android's modern toolkit that simplifies Android UI development. It's already used by thousands of apps around the world such as Twitter, Airbnb and Google Play; if you're not already using it, it's a great time to start. To make learning Compose even easier, we are launching Compose Camp, a series of in-person and virtual sessions where you can learn how to build Android apps with Jetpack Compose alongside your peers. Grab your “camping gear” and see how you can participate in a Compose Camp near you!

Jetpack Compose accelerates app development by enabling you to use and maintain less code, giving you intuitive & powerful APIs so you can leverage the best of Android when building compelling experiences for your users. Google is committed to increasing opportunities for anyone to learn Android development, so we're making learning the latest best practices more accessible in ways that suit different learning styles. We’ve heard how enjoyable and impactful it can be to learn in a group setting from many of you, which is why we’re launching Compose Camp around the world. You can learn how to build Android apps with Compose with the support of peers and “camp leaders” to guide you along the way.



Compose Camp is for beginners and experienced developers

If you’re new to Android development or just getting started with programming, check out the Beginner track where you’ll learn basic programming concepts and fundamentals of app development, including how to build user interfaces with Jetpack Compose.

If you’re an Android developer who wants to learn how to migrate from Views to Compose or are looking to learn more about building UI using advanced features, then the Experienced track is for you. You’ll start with the essentials of Jetpack Compose, and then dive deep into various Compose topics.


Learning in a group can be more effective and fun

Many of you have told us that you enjoy learning alongside others because of the support and help you get within the context of a community. Google developer communities are a great way to connect with students and peers in your industry, tackle technical challenges together, and learn skills from each other that you can apply directly to your projects. They will be hosting Compose Camps around the world over the next few months, so look for one near you!

You can lead your own Compose Camp

This is also a great opportunity to build your expertise through leading and teaching others; you can become a “Camp Leader.” We have everything you need to lead your own Compose Camp including materials to help you facilitate learning, guidance on how to run a session, sample slides, and materials to recruit a group of peers.


Learn Compose at your own pace

If “solo-camping” is more your style, check out these online courses that can be done at your own pace. The Android Basics with Compose course is recommended if you’re just getting started with Android development. If you already have some Android development knowledge, check out the Jetpack Compose for Android Developers course.

We hope these resources are helpful for your journey in learning Android development and Compose. Looking forward to seeing you at Compose Camp!

Optimize for Android (Go edition): Lessons from Google apps – Part 1

Posted by Niharika Arora, Developer Relations Engineer

The Android operating system brings the power of computing to everyone. This vision applies to all users, including those on entry-level phones that face real constraints across data, storage, memory, and more.
This was especially important for us to get right because, when we first announced Android (Go edition) back in 2017, people using low-end phones accounted for 57% of all device shipments globally (IDC Mobile Phone Tracker).


What is Android (Go edition)?

Android (Go edition) is a mobile operating system built for entry-level smartphones with less RAM. Android (Go edition) runs lighter and saves data, enabling Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to build affordable, entry-level devices that empower people with possibility. RAM requirements are listed below, and for full Android (Go edition) device capability specifications, see this page on our site.

Year

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

Release

Android 8

Android 9

Android 10

Android 11

Android 12

Android 13

Min RAM

512MB

512MB

512MB

1GB

1GB

2GB



Android (Go edition) provides an optimized experience for low-RAM devices. By tailoring the configuration and making key trade-offs, we’re able to improve speed and performance for low-end devices and offer a quality phone experience for more than 250M people around the world.


Recent Updates

We are constantly making phones powered by Android (Go edition) more accessible with additional performance optimizations and features designed specifically for new & novice internet users, like translation, app switching, and data saving.

Below are the recent improvements we made for Android 12:

Faster App Launches

Longer Battery Life 

Easier App Sharing 

More Privacy Control





Why build for Android (Go edition)?

With the fast growing & easily accessible internet, and all the features available at low cost, OEMs and developers are aiming & building their apps specifically for Android (Go edition) devices.

Fast forward to today — over 250 million+ people worldwide actively use an Android (Go edition) phone. And also considering the big OEMs like Jio, Samsung, Oppo, Realme etc. building Android (Go edition) devices, there is a need for developers to build apps that perform well especially on Go devices.

But the markets with the fast growing internet and smartphone penetration can have some challenging issues, such as:
  • Your app is not starting within the required time limit.
  • A lot of features/required capabilities increases your app size 
  • How to handle memory pressure while working on Go apps?


Optimize your apps for Android (Go edition)

To help your app succeed and deliver the best possible experience in developing markets, we have put together some best practices based on experience building our own Google apps Gboard & Camera from Google.


Approach

Define Metrics & breakdowns → Benchmark Metrics → Identify bottlenecks → Optimize bottlenecks → Add regression tests.        ↑_________________________________↓

Phases

Description

DefineBefore starting any optimization effort, it’s important to define the goals. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have to be defined for the app.
  • KPIs can be common across different apps and some can be very specific. Some examples of KPIs can be  
KPICategory
App Startup Latency
Common to all apps
App Crash Rate
Common to all apps
End to end latency for CUJ - Camera Shot
Specific to Camera app
App Not Responding RateCommon to all apps
  • Once KPIs are defined the team should agree on the target thresholds. This can be derived from the minimum user experience/benchmarks in mind.
  • KPIs should ideally be defined from the perspective of balancing User Experience and technical complexity.
BreakdownOnce KPIs are defined, the next steps could be to break down a given KPI into individual signal metrics.
  • For example → End to end latency for CUJ (shots in Camera) can be divided into → Frame capture latency, image processing latency, time spent on saving a processed image to disk etc.
  • Similarly, App Crash Rate can be bucketed into → Crash due to unhandled errors, Crash due to high memory usage, Crash due to ANR etc.
BenchmarkBenchmark or measure the KPI values and individual metrics to identify current performance.
If KPI targets are met, things are good. If not → identify the bottlenecks by looking at the individual breakdowns.
Repeat the process


After optimizing a certain bottleneck go back and benchmark the metrics again to see if the KPI targets are met. If not, repeat the process. If yes, great job!
Add Regular regression testThat either runs for every change or in some frequency to identify regressions in KPIs. It is more difficult to debug and find sources of regressions or bugs than to not allow them to get into the codebase. Don’t allow the changes that fail the KPI goals unless the decision is to update the KPI targets.
  • Try to invest in building a regression infrastructure to deal with such issues in early stages.
  • Decide on how often tests should run? What should be the optimal frequency for your app?



Optimize App Memory

GBoard used the onTrimMemory() signal to trim unneeded memory while it goes in the background and there is not enough memory to keep as many background processes running as desired, for example, trimming unneeded memory usage from expressions, search, view cache or openable extensions in background. It helped them reduce the number of times being low memory killed and the average background RSS. Resident Set Size(RSS) is basically the portion of memory occupied by your app process that is held in main memory (RAM). To know more about RSS, please refer here. 
  • Check if malloc can be replaced with mmap when accessing read-only & large files: mmap is only recommended for reading a large file onto memory ('read-only memory mapped file'). The kernel has some special optimizations for read-only memory mapped files, such as unloading unused pages.
Typically this is useful for loading large assets or ML models.
  • Scheduling tasks which require similar resources(CPU, IO, Memory) appropriately: Concurrent scheduling could lead to multiple memory intensive operations to run in parallel and leading to them competing for resources and exceeding the peak memory usage of the app. The Camera from Google app found multiple problems, ensured a cap to peak memory and further optimized their app by appropriately allocating resources, separating tasks into CPU intensive, low latency tasks(tasks that need to be finished fast for Good UX) & IO tasks. Schedule tasks in right thread pools / executors so they can run on resource constrained devices in a balanced fashion.
  • Find & fix memory leaks: Fighting leaks is difficult but there are tools like Android Studio Memory Profiler/Perfetto specifically available to reduce the effort to find and fix memory leaks.
Google apps used the tools to identify and fix memory issues which helped reduce the memory usage/footprint of the app. This reduction allowed other components of the app to run without adding additional memory pressure on the system.

An example from Gboard app is about View leaks
A specific case is caching subviews, like this: 
 

void onKeyboardViewCreated(View keyboardView) {
  this.keyButtonA = keyboardView.findViewById(...);
  ...
} 

The |keyboardView| might be released at some time, and the |keyButtonA| should be assigned as null appropriately at some time to avoid the view leak.

Lessons learned:
    • Always add framework/library updates after analyzing the changes and verifying its impact early on.
    • Make sure to release memory before assigning new value to a pointer pointing to other object allocation in heap in Java. (native backend java objects) 
For example :
In Java it should be ok to do
 

ClassA obj = new ClassA("x");
// ... something
obj = new ClassB("y");
 
GC should clean this up eventually.
 
if ClassA allocates native resources underneath and doesn't cleanup automatically on finalize(..) and requires caller to call some release(..)  method, it needs to be like this 
 

ClassA obj = new ClassA("x");
// ... something

// Explicit cleanup.
obj.release();

obj = new ClassB("y");

 
else it will leak native heap memory. 
  • Optimize your bitmaps: Large images/drawables usually consume more memory in the app. Google apps identified and optimized large bitmaps that are used in their apps. 
Lessons learned :
    • Prefer Lazy/on-demand initializations of big drawables.
    • Release view when necessary.
    • Avoid using full colored bitmaps when possible. 
For example: Gboard’s glide typing feature needs to show an overlay view with a bitmap of trails, which can only has the alpha channel and apply a color filter for rendering.
 

// Creating the bitmap for trails.

trailBitmap = Bitmap.createBitmap(w, h, Bitmap.Config.ALPHA_8);

...

// Setup paint for trails.

trailPaint.setColorFilter(new ColorMatrixColorFilter(new ColorMatrix(new float[] {

  0, 0, 0, 0, (color >> 16) & 0xFF,

  0, 0, 0, 0, (color >> 8) & 0xFF,

  0, 0, 0, 0, color & 0xFF,

  0, 0, 0, 1, 0

})));

...

// onDraw

@Override

protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {

  super.onDraw(canvas);

  if (trailBitmap != null) {

    canvas.drawBitmap(trailBitmap, 0, 0, trailPaint);

  }

}

 
A screenshot of glide typing on Gboard
  • Check and only set the alpha channel for the bitmap for complex custom views used in the app. This saved them a couple of MBs (per screen size/density).
  • While using Glide, 
    • The ARGB_8888 format has 4 bytes/pixel consumption while RGB_565 has 2 bytes/pixel. Memory footprint gets reduced to half when RGB_565 format is used but using lower bitmap quality comes with a price too. Whether you need alpha values or not, try to fit your case accordingly.
    • Configure and use cache wisely when using a 3P lib like Glide for image rendering.
  • Try to choose other options for GIFs in your app when building for Android (Go edition) as GIFs take a lot of memory.
  • The aapt tool can optimize the image resources placed in res/drawable/ with lossless compression during the build process. For example, the aapt tool can convert a true-color PNG that does not require more than 256 colors to an 8-bit PNG with a color palette. Doing so results in an image of equal quality but a smaller memory footprint. Read more here.
  • You can reduce PNG file sizes without losing image quality using tools like pngcrush, pngquant, or zopflipng. All of these tools can reduce PNG file size while preserving the perceptive image quality.
  • You could use resizable bitmaps. The Draw 9-patch tool is a WYSIWYG editor included in Android Studio that allows you to create bitmap images that automatically resize to accommodate the contents of the view and the size of the screen. Learn more about the tool here. 

Recap

This part of the blog outlines why developers should consider building for Android (Go edition), a standard approach to follow while optimizing their apps and some recommendations & learnings from Google apps to improve their app memory and appropriately allocate resources.

In the next part of this blog, we will talk about the best practices on Startup latency, app size and the tools used by Google apps to identify and fix performance issues.

Privacy Sandbox: Developer Preview 5 is here!

Posted by Fred Chung, Android Developer Relations

Today, we’re releasing the Privacy Sandbox on Android Developer Preview 5 ‒ it’s a major milestone that will become the foundation for upcoming Privacy Sandbox Beta releases.

We appreciate that many of you have tested the Developer Preview and have reported issues and shared your feedback. This feedback has helped us evolve the Privacy Sandbox design. For example, we have modified the SDK Runtime design to allow reflection API usage, and have published additional design proposals on FLEDGE services, mediation, and app-to-web measurement.

Let’s have a look at the specifics in this release.


What’s in Developer Preview 5?

Developer Preview 5 includes additional functionality, data validation enhancements, and API signature changes across the privacy preserving APIs and the SDK Runtime. See the release notes for details.


Attribution Reporting API



FLEDGE on Android API

  • To provide up-to-date data for auctions, you can set up a daily fetch URL to update custom audience AdData lists and other metadata.
  • This release incorporates various API signature changes and additional parameter validation to ensure robustness. Refer to the release notes for details. Be sure to update the sample code and your test projects using previous Developer Preview releases.


SDK Runtime

  • Apps get additional control on runtime enabled SDK lifecycle events, such as when the SDK is unexpectedly terminated by the platform. Implementing the SdkSandboxLifecycleCallback allows the app to take appropriate actions to recover.
  • After successfully loading an SDK, apps now have access to an IBinder interface to facilitate 2-way communications with the runtime-enabled SDK.


Topics API

  • Updated taxonomy for classification of mobile apps.


AdServices permissions

  • App developers must now declare AdServices permissions to access the privacy preserving APIs. Learn more.

In the coming months, we’ll continue to use the Developer Previews to innovate and implement new features. We’ll publish more details about the Beta and these future releases in the coming months.


Get started with Developer Preview 5

With today’s Developer Preview release, we hope to continue working with the industry and developers to get prepared for Privacy Sandbox on Android. The release provides the resources you need to begin early testing of features and share feedback. To get started developing, see instructions to set up the SDK and system images on the emulator or supported Pixel devices.

For more information on the Privacy Sandbox on Android Developer Preview, visit the developer site and sign up for our newsletter to receive regular updates.

#WeArePlay | Meet Sam from Chicago. More stories from Peru, Croatia and Estonia.

Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing

A medical game for doctors, a language game for kids, a scary game for horror lovers and an escape room game for thrill seekers! In this latest batch of #WeArePlay stories, we’re celebrating the founders behind a wonderful variety of games from all over the world. Have a read and get gaming! 


To start, let’s meet Sam from Chicago. Coming from a family of doctors, his Dad challenged him to make a game to help those in the medical field. Sam agreed, made a game and months later discovered over 100,000 doctors were able to practice medical procedures. This early success inspired him to found Level Ex - a company of 135, making world-class medical games for doctors across the globe. Despite his achievements, his Dad still hopes Sam may one day get into medicine himself and clinch a Nobel prize.


Next, a few more stories from around the world:
  • Aldo and Sandro from Peru - founders of Dark Dome. They combine storytelling and art to make thrilling and chilling games, filled with plot twists and jump scares.

  • Vladimir, Tomislav and Boris from Croatia - founders of Pine Studio. They won the Indie Games Festival 2021 with their game Cats In Time. 

  • Kelly, Mikk, Reimo and Madde from Estonia - founders of ALPA kids. Their language games for children have a huge impact on early education and language preservation.

Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay and stay tuned for even more coming soon.


How useful did you find this blog post?


Announcing the new guide to Android app modularization

Posted by Miłosz Moczkowski, Developer Relations Engineer, Android

As your app grows in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage, build and scale. One way to address this challenge is a software technique called modular programming, or modularization in short. It’s a practice of organizing a codebase into loosely coupled and independent entities - modules.

We know that modularization has been a hot topic among the Android developers community for quite some time now. Recently, we ran a survey to ask you about your experiences in this topic. 86% of developers said that they work on multi-module codebases regularly, while over 90% stated that modularization is a practice they would recommend considering.

All large apps are fundamentally modular, and at Google, we’ve been utilizing modularization to develop our most popular applications such as YouTube, Play Store or Google News. This is what Google News team has to say about this practice:

“Modularity of code is critical to managing complexity, stability, readability, and testability in an ever-growing codebase.”

On the other hand though, over 54% responders mentioned that it’s difficult to find good learning materials on this topic and almost 95% claimed that currently available materials on developer.android.com are insufficient! In response to this popular demand, we’ve launched the guide to Android app modularization. The guide is split into two parts. The overview page gives you a high level, theoretical overview of the matter and addresses the following questions:
  • What is modularization?
  • What are the benefits of modularizing my codebase?
  • What are the things to watch out for when modularizing?
  • Is modularization the right technique for you?
The common modularization patterns page dives deep into practical examples in the context of the modern Android architecture and gives answer to the these problems:
  • What is the low coupling & high cohesion principle?
  • What are the types of modules and their roles?
  • How do modules pass data between each other?

To see modularization in action, check out the Now in Android project. It's a fully functional app which has a multi-module codebase, and there's a handy modularization learning journey which outlines what the modules do and how they communicate with each other.

Is this for you?


This modularization guide is targeted to intermediate and advanced developers. The guide focuses on modularization from a software architecture point of view. If you’re a beginner, only starting your Android developer journey, you should familiarize yourself with our guide to app architecture first. Modularization guide assumes you are familiar with our recommended app architecture.

It’s just a beginning


We’re not done yet. With modularization being such a wide topic, the two recently released pages are only a beginning. Help us shape the guidance by giving us feedback and telling us which issues you want us to cover. You can find us on social media or use the documentation issue tracker to report bugs.

Announcing the new guide to Android app modularization

Posted by Miłosz Moczkowski, Developer Relations Engineer, Android

As your app grows in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage, build and scale. One way to address this challenge is a software technique called modular programming, or modularization in short. It’s a practice of organizing a codebase into loosely coupled and independent entities - modules.

We know that modularization has been a hot topic among the Android developers community for quite some time now. Recently, we ran a survey to ask you about your experiences in this topic. 86% of developers said that they work on multi-module codebases regularly, while over 90% stated that modularization is a practice they would recommend considering.

All large apps are fundamentally modular, and at Google, we’ve been utilizing modularization to develop our most popular applications such as YouTube, Play Store or Google News. This is what Google News team has to say about this practice:

“Modularity of code is critical to managing complexity, stability, readability, and testability in an ever-growing codebase.”

On the other hand though, over 54% responders mentioned that it’s difficult to find good learning materials on this topic and almost 95% claimed that currently available materials on developer.android.com are insufficient! In response to this popular demand, we’ve launched the guide to Android app modularization. The guide is split into two parts. The overview page gives you a high level, theoretical overview of the matter and addresses the following questions:
  • What is modularization?
  • What are the benefits of modularizing my codebase?
  • What are the things to watch out for when modularizing?
  • Is modularization the right technique for you?
The common modularization patterns page dives deep into practical examples in the context of the modern Android architecture and gives answer to the these problems:
  • What is the low coupling & high cohesion principle?
  • What are the types of modules and their roles?
  • How do modules pass data between each other?

To see modularization in action, check out the Now in Android project. It's a fully functional app which has a multi-module codebase, and there's a handy modularization learning journey which outlines what the modules do and how they communicate with each other.

Is this for you?


This modularization guide is targeted to intermediate and advanced developers. The guide focuses on modularization from a software architecture point of view. If you’re a beginner, only starting your Android developer journey, you should familiarize yourself with our guide to app architecture first. Modularization guide assumes you are familiar with our recommended app architecture.

It’s just a beginning


We’re not done yet. With modularization being such a wide topic, the two recently released pages are only a beginning. Help us shape the guidance by giving us feedback and telling us which issues you want us to cover. You can find us on social media or use the documentation issue tracker to report bugs.

Announcing the new guide to Android app modularization

Posted by Miłosz Moczkowski, Developer Relations Engineer, Android

As your app grows in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage, build and scale. One way to address this challenge is a software technique called modular programming, or modularization in short. It’s a practice of organizing a codebase into loosely coupled and independent entities - modules.

We know that modularization has been a hot topic among the Android developers community for quite some time now. Recently, we ran a survey to ask you about your experiences in this topic. 86% of developers said that they work on multi-module codebases regularly, while over 90% stated that modularization is a practice they would recommend considering.

All large apps are fundamentally modular, and at Google, we’ve been utilizing modularization to develop our most popular applications such as YouTube, Play Store or Google News. This is what Google News team has to say about this practice:

“Modularity of code is critical to managing complexity, stability, readability, and testability in an ever-growing codebase.”

On the other hand though, over 54% responders mentioned that it’s difficult to find good learning materials on this topic and almost 95% claimed that currently available materials on developer.android.com are insufficient! In response to this popular demand, we’ve launched the guide to Android app modularization. The guide is split into two parts. The overview page gives you a high level, theoretical overview of the matter and addresses the following questions:
  • What is modularization?
  • What are the benefits of modularizing my codebase?
  • What are the things to watch out for when modularizing?
  • Is modularization the right technique for you?
The common modularization patterns page dives deep into practical examples in the context of the modern Android architecture and gives answer to the these problems:
  • What is the low coupling & high cohesion principle?
  • What are the types of modules and their roles?
  • How do modules pass data between each other?

To see modularization in action, check out the Now in Android project. It's a fully functional app which has a multi-module codebase, and there's a handy modularization learning journey which outlines what the modules do and how they communicate with each other.

Is this for you?


This modularization guide is targeted to intermediate and advanced developers. The guide focuses on modularization from a software architecture point of view. If you’re a beginner, only starting your Android developer journey, you should familiarize yourself with our guide to app architecture first. Modularization guide assumes you are familiar with our recommended app architecture.

It’s just a beginning


We’re not done yet. With modularization being such a wide topic, the two recently released pages are only a beginning. Help us shape the guidance by giving us feedback and telling us which issues you want us to cover. You can find us on social media or use the documentation issue tracker to report bugs.

Announcing the new guide to Android app modularization

Posted by Miłosz Moczkowski, Developer Relations Engineer, Android

As your app grows in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage, build and scale. One way to address this challenge is a software technique called modular programming, or modularization in short. It’s a practice of organizing a codebase into loosely coupled and independent entities - modules.

We know that modularization has been a hot topic among the Android developers community for quite some time now. Recently, we ran a survey to ask you about your experiences in this topic. 86% of developers said that they work on multi-module codebases regularly, while over 90% stated that modularization is a practice they would recommend considering.

All large apps are fundamentally modular, and at Google, we’ve been utilizing modularization to develop our most popular applications such as YouTube, Play Store or Google News. This is what Google News team has to say about this practice:

“Modularity of code is critical to managing complexity, stability, readability, and testability in an ever-growing codebase.”

On the other hand though, over 54% responders mentioned that it’s difficult to find good learning materials on this topic and almost 95% claimed that currently available materials on developer.android.com are insufficient! In response to this popular demand, we’ve launched the guide to Android app modularization. The guide is split into two parts. The overview page gives you a high level, theoretical overview of the matter and addresses the following questions:
  • What is modularization?
  • What are the benefits of modularizing my codebase?
  • What are the things to watch out for when modularizing?
  • Is modularization the right technique for you?
The common modularization patterns page dives deep into practical examples in the context of the modern Android architecture and gives answer to the these problems:
  • What is the low coupling & high cohesion principle?
  • What are the types of modules and their roles?
  • How do modules pass data between each other?

To see modularization in action, check out the Now in Android project. It's a fully functional app which has a multi-module codebase, and there's a handy modularization learning journey which outlines what the modules do and how they communicate with each other.

Is this for you?


This modularization guide is targeted to intermediate and advanced developers. The guide focuses on modularization from a software architecture point of view. If you’re a beginner, only starting your Android developer journey, you should familiarize yourself with our guide to app architecture first. Modularization guide assumes you are familiar with our recommended app architecture.

It’s just a beginning


We’re not done yet. With modularization being such a wide topic, the two recently released pages are only a beginning. Help us shape the guidance by giving us feedback and telling us which issues you want us to cover. You can find us on social media or use the documentation issue tracker to report bugs.

Announcing the new guide to Android app modularization

Posted by Miłosz Moczkowski, Developer Relations Engineer, Android

As your app grows in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage, build and scale. One way to address this challenge is a software technique called modular programming, or modularization in short. It’s a practice of organizing a codebase into loosely coupled and independent entities - modules.

We know that modularization has been a hot topic among the Android developers community for quite some time now. Recently, we ran a survey to ask you about your experiences in this topic. 86% of developers said that they work on multi-module codebases regularly, while over 90% stated that modularization is a practice they would recommend considering.

All large apps are fundamentally modular, and at Google, we’ve been utilizing modularization to develop our most popular applications such as YouTube, Play Store or Google News. This is what Google News team has to say about this practice:

“Modularity of code is critical to managing complexity, stability, readability, and testability in an ever-growing codebase.”

On the other hand though, over 54% responders mentioned that it’s difficult to find good learning materials on this topic and almost 95% claimed that currently available materials on developer.android.com are insufficient! In response to this popular demand, we’ve launched the guide to Android app modularization. The guide is split into two parts. The overview page gives you a high level, theoretical overview of the matter and addresses the following questions:
  • What is modularization?
  • What are the benefits of modularizing my codebase?
  • What are the things to watch out for when modularizing?
  • Is modularization the right technique for you?
The common modularization patterns page dives deep into practical examples in the context of the modern Android architecture and gives answer to the these problems:
  • What is the low coupling & high cohesion principle?
  • What are the types of modules and their roles?
  • How do modules pass data between each other?

To see modularization in action, check out the Now in Android project. It's a fully functional app which has a multi-module codebase, and there's a handy modularization learning journey which outlines what the modules do and how they communicate with each other.

Is this for you?


This modularization guide is targeted to intermediate and advanced developers. The guide focuses on modularization from a software architecture point of view. If you’re a beginner, only starting your Android developer journey, you should familiarize yourself with our guide to app architecture first. Modularization guide assumes you are familiar with our recommended app architecture.

It’s just a beginning


We’re not done yet. With modularization being such a wide topic, the two recently released pages are only a beginning. Help us shape the guidance by giving us feedback and telling us which issues you want us to cover. You can find us on social media or use the documentation issue tracker to report bugs.

Google Play announces the winners of the Indie Games Festival and the Accelerator class of 2022

Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Global Developer Marketing

Today, at the finals of our Indie Games Festival, thousands of people came together to celebrate the passion, creativity and innovation of small games studios.

Players, jury members, and industry experts attended the event - hosted in a custom virtual world - where they discovered the finalist games and met the people who made them. They were also the first to find out who the winners are, who will receive prizes and promotions that will help them boost their visibility.

At the event we also announced the studios selected to join our Indie Games Accelerator. These companies will receive exclusive education and mentorship over a 10-week virtual program, to help them build and grow successful businesses.

Please join us in congratulating each of the winning games and studios.

Meet the festival winners

Europe

Dungeons of Dreadrock by Christoph Minnameier, from Germany
Please, Touch The Artwork by Thomas Waterzooi, from Belgium
Quadline by Ivan Kovalov, from Ukraine



South Korea

The Greater by IM GAME

Users' Choice Award:
Nyang Tower: Square Logic by Studio Box Cat

Japan

RASPBERRY MASH by IGNITION M
SOULVARS by ginolabo


Indie Games Accelerator | Class of 2022

Americas

Asantee Games - Brazil
Fiveamp Hawaii - US
MegaJogos - Brazil
Niebla Games - Chile
Northern Forge Studios - Canada
SHD Games Inc. - Canada
Skyborne Games Inc. - US
Solaris Mobile - Brazil
Starling Team - Brazil
Temple Gates Games - US
Asia Pacific

Drakemount - South Korea
Eternal Dream Studio - Indonesia
Gambir Studio - Indonesia
Hoit Studio - South Korea
Ranida Games - Philippines
Rigged Box Softworks - Indonesia
SweatyChair - Australia
The Sane Studio - South Korea
THEAND COMPANY - South Korea
Vnstart LLC - Vietnam
Europe, Middle East & Africa

Alcore Games - Ukraine
Appox AB - Sweden
Hammurabi Games - Turkiye
JE Software AB - Sweden
LoopyMood - Ukraine
PocApp Studios AB - Sweden
Rarepixels Indie Games - Spain
Rikzu Games - Portugal
Rojeh Maher - Egypt
Štěpán Fiala - Prague


Didn’t make it?

If you missed the event or would like to explore further, you can still log in to the virtual world and discover more about the finalists. Available for a limited time only. Explore now.

Stay tuned for more programs helping small games companies grow on Google Play.



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