Category Archives: Android Developers Blog

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A modern approach to Android development, with Jetpack Compose and more!

Posted by Stephanie Cuthbertson, Director, Product Management animated Android header image for blog post

Modern Android Development today

Perhaps as a consequence of Android's flexibility, we often get asked by developers what does the Android team recommend when it comes to building apps? You’ve told us: you love our openness..but you’d also love us to marry it with an opinion about the right way to do things. And, to make sure the right way is also the easiest way. And so today, at the Android Dev Summit, the team wanted to answer that question for you.

We call our recommendation “modern Android development". Opinionated and powerful, for fast, easy development. Taking away everything that slows you down so you can focus on building incredible experiences. You can see it in the investments we’ve made like creating Android Studio and Jetpack. (Over 90% of our pro developers are using Android Studio today.) Kotlin and Compose are especially great recent examples. Kotlin is a modern, concise language -- something you asked us for and is now the recommended language for Android. Compose is a modern declarative UI toolkit built for the next 10 years. And this might sound a little strange, but we chose and designed these tools to be enjoyable to use: we think that’s important too. Both Kotlin and Compose also have a critically important property. They are designed to be compatible with your existing apps. This means you can phase in Kotlin code and Compose views on your timeline.

It all starts with a great modern language: Kotlin

Modern Android starts with fantastic language support.In fact, we recently passed a milestone where almost 60% of our top 1000 apps are using Kotlin. And we’re working with JetBrains to make it even better: faster kotlin compile speeds, incremental annotation processing with KAPT, better IDE typing latency, more lint checks, desugaring in D8 and R8, new optimizations in R8 that are aware of Kotlin-specific bytecode patterns. And we’re releasing full IDE support for Kotlin build scripts today. If you want to grow your skills, we are launching an Advanced Android course with Kotlin on Udacity. And, for those who are already experts, we’re also launching a new Android Developer Certification in Kotlin, available at a discount for the next three months. We’re working to make all of our supported first-class languages — Kotlin, the Java programming language, and C++ — better for you and your team, with Java8 library desugaring, NDK r21 with updated LLVM, GNU Make, Fortify enabled by default, and more.

Jetpack: Build high quality, powerful apps with less code

Jetpack is designed to solve real-world problems you face every day, and is used by over 84% of the top 10,000 Play Store apps. And we continue to make Jetpack even more helpful:

Benchmarking, first announced at Google I/O, is now available as a release candidate. This library makes it easier to measure the performance of your app with confidence.
Viewbinding is an easier way to access Views from your code. It is a type-safe solution with minimal build-time impact, no more findViewById(), no more annotation processors.
CameraX simplifies the development experience and lets you focus on your app instead by addressing the differences between the many devices in the Android ecosystem, like Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Motorola, LG who are already unifying behind CameraX. Previewed at Google I/O, CameraX will be available in Beta in December.

Compose: Android’s new UI toolkit to build beautiful, native apps, now in developer preview

Compose makes it easy to build beautiful, native apps. It provides a declarative way to build UIs which makes your code more intuitive and concise. Inspired by Kotlin, you can adopt Compose at your own pace thanks to seamless compatibility with the existing UI toolkit.

Today we are releasing the Jetpack Compose Developer Preview. All you need to do is download the latest Preview build of Android Studio. Compose is being developed completely in the open, in AOSP. The continuous feedback we receive has led to many API improvements and we want to thank you for providing feedback in our developer studies and the Kotlinlang Slack group. As we enter developer preview, we need even more feedback as we work towards bringing Jetpack Compose to beta next year and ready for use in production apps.

Android Studio 4.0 Canary

Today we also released the first canary of Android Studio 4.0 - built hand in hand with Compose for powerful, integrated tooling support. Android Studio 4.0 includes Compose Live Preview, Code Completion, and a full sample of a Compose app. You’ll also find the new Motion Editor, Java 8 Language library desugaring, full support for KTS files, Kotlin live templates, and more.

Android App Bundles and dynamic delivery testing improvements

In just eighteen months after launch, over 270K Android App Bundles are now in production covering 25% of all active installs. Based on your feedback, we’re making App Bundles and Dynamic Delivery much easier to test. Internal app sharing lets you share test builds of your app bundle as easily as you share APKs. You can now grant anyone in the team ability to upload artifacts. You don’t need to sign test versions with your production app signing key, you don’t need to use version codes, and you can upload debuggable artifacts. We’re also making it possible to get download links for old versions of your app from the Play Console, whether they’re app bundles or APKs. And starting today, we’re launching offline testing of dynamic delivery with the fake split install manager so can replicate splits being installed by the Play Store while testing locally.

A modern distribution platform, centered around user trust

User trust and safety has always been a top priority at Google Play, with human reviewers, constant improvements to play protect, and policy updates to evolve with the threats we see. As a result, apps that are installed from Google Play are an order of magnitude safer than from any other source. This year, we’ve been increasing all our detection capabilities for impersonators, repackaging, bad content and other forms of abuse, but we know there's more we can do, and the threats are constantly changing. With your help, we’ve reduced access to sensitive data and have made Play even safer for children and families. We restricted SMS/Call log permissions to only apps that need them as part of their core functionality, and as a result 98% fewer apps access this sensitive data. Thanks to your hard work, users are safer, and know they are safer when they download apps that request fewer permissions.

The Android Developer Challenge!

Over ten years ago, we announced the first Android Developer Challenge. Today, modern Android is shaping the next generation platform. So it seems kind of fitting to announce: the Android Developer Challenge is back! The first Developer Challenge we’re announcing is Helpful Innovation and Machine Learning. Take Live Captions: for the almost 500 million people who are deaf and hard of hearing, Live Captions bring content to life and is exactly the type of machine learning-powered innovation we expect to see more of someday, and with your help we can turn someday into today. You can read more about the challenge here.

So - that’s a quick tour of Modern Android and the road ahead across our developer experience! Whether you’re joining us for Android Dev Summit in person or on the livestream, we have nearly 60 sessions from over 100 speakers where we’ll go deep on everything you need to know about Android. Thank you!

Source: Android Developers Blog

Android Developer Challenge: helpful innovation, powered by On-Device Machine Learning + you!

Posted by The Android team

Developers like you have always played an important role in shaping the direction of Android, fueling the wave of Android innovation. It’s the reason that when we first launched the SDK for Android 10+ years ago, we simultaneously announced the Android Developer Challenge: a way to help reward model apps and show us what user problems you wanted to solve. As Android continues to push the boundaries into emerging areas like ML, 5G, foldables and more, we need your help to bring to life the consumer experiences that will define these new frontiers.

So we’re bringing back the Android Developer Challenge and asking you to help us unlock new experiences on Android, and help inspire other developers around these emerging technologies.

As we kick off this challenge, the first area we’ll be focusing on is On-Device Machine Learning. At Google, we’re big believers in how this new technology can open up a world of helpful innovation so you can get things done in ways you never thought possible. Take Live Captions: for the almost 500 million people who are deaf and hard of hearing, Live Captions bring content to life and is exactly the type of machine learning-powered innovation we expect to see more of someday, and with your help we can turn someday into today!

Bringing your idea to life in front of billions of eyes

Got an idea? Whether it’s still a concept or ready for users, tell us how you could use Google’s help, and how it supports the mission of using machine learning to help people get something done. Join the #AndroidDeveloperChallenge topic on GitHub, and share your idea as a repository under this topic. Don’t forget to come back here and officially submit your concept.

We’ll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition. And once the app is ready, we’ll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. Here’s what those 10 developers will get:

Expertise and development support bootcamp: We’ll work with you to provide expertise and guidance to help in your plans to bring your app from concept to reality, including:

An all-expenses paid, working session with a panel of experts at Google HQ in Mountain View, CA
Google engineer mentorship at the bootcamp, providing guidance and technical expertise on how to help your plans to bring your app to fruition

Exposure and street cred! Once your idea is ready for prime-time, we’ll help you get users, and celebrate you to the broader Android community, including:

A collection on Google Play where we’ll feature your app (apps must be ready for Google Play on May 1, and must meet Google’s minimum quality requirements)
Tickets to Google I/O 2020
And we’ll celebrate these experiences to the broader Android developer community on developers.android.com. We might even showcase you at Google I/O, in places like the sandbox, sessions, perhaps even a keynote!

Helpful innovation is an important investment area for us on the Android team, and On-Device Machine Learning has played a critical role in powering new features in the last several releases of Android. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Source: Android Developers Blog

All About Updates: More Treble

Posted by Iliyan Malchev, Project Treble Architect

Android 10, our newest release, brings helpful tools for both developers and consumers like suggested actions in Smart Reply to help you multitask faster, Dark theme for battery saving, Focus mode that keeps you from digital distractions, and more. And with almost 50 changes related to privacy and security, Android 10 gives you greater protection, transparency, and control over your data than ever before. It is important to both users and developers that these new releases find their way to mobile devices as fast as possible. In this post, we’ll share an update on the progress we’ve made with Project Treble, an initiative to help manufacturers update devices to new versions of Android more quickly.

Wait and See

When we launched Project Treble with Android 8.0 Oreo, we asked ourselves if our investment would pay off. There were two factors to consider in measuring the effectiveness of the program:

Complexity: The new architecture was a major overhaul, meaning it could only be implemented for devices launching with Android 8.0 Oreo and not for devices upgrading from Android 7.0 Nougat and older versions.
Time: We had to wait until we released Android 9 Pie to measure the rate of upgrades from Oreo and compare this number to the previous releases.

The Partner Beta Program

One of the earliest indications that Project Treble was having a positive effect was our ability to run the Beta program for Android 9 Pie on many more devices from more manufacturers. In addition to Google Pixels, we had 7 device models from 7 OEMs supporting Android 9 Pie Beta.

With Android 10, this year, we increased the number of devices to 18 (again, in addition to Pixels), representing 12 OEMs. This represents a significant increase over the previous year and shows that Project Treble is having an impact.

Distribution Chart

Beta releases are great, but how did we fare on actual upgrades? To answer this question, we considered two points in time. The first point is right before we released Android 9. The second point is right before we released Android 10. By each of these points in time, the previous release had had a year to reach devices.

In late July, 2018, just before Android 9 Pie was launched in AOSP, Android 8.0 (Oreo) accounted for 8.9% of the ecosystem. By comparison, in late August 2019, just before we launched Android 10, Android 9 (Pie) accounted for 22.6% of the ecosystem. This makes it the largest fraction of the ecosystem, and shows that Project Treble has had a positive effect on updatability.

The adoption of Android Pie has been much higher than that of Android Oreo and Oreo MR1 when measured relative to the launch date.

Continuous Improvements in Updatability

The progress shown above results from work we did in Android 8.0 Oreo. We have made serious improvements with Android 9 Pie as well. The most significant one was our behind-the-scenes collaboration with silicon manufacturers. This work had the effect of reducing the average time to upgrade by more than 3 months, and we expect to see upgrades from Android 9 to Android 10 noticeably sooner this year.

There is also the sheer amount of hardening work on the architecture. We completed the seal between the vendor and system components of Android, which ensures that new versions of the top part of the OS run on older versions provided by our partners. We formalized the interface to the Android Linux kernel, expanded the Treble test suite (VTS), and did so much more. As a result, upgrades from Android 9 to Android 10 are going much more smoothly, as evidenced by direct feedback from our OEM and silicon partners.

We are beginning to see the effects already. This year, we saw two OEMs issue software updates to Android 10 on the day we announced it: Xiaomi and Essential. On the same day, OnePlus started a public beta program, and just a few days later, they started updating devices. HMD Global’s Nokia 8.1 just started receiving the update this week. In addition to these partners, many manufacturers such as ASUS, LG, Motorola, OPPO, Realme, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Transsion, and Vivo have committed to updating some of their devices to Android 10 by the end of the year. Plus, new devices are already hitting shelves with Android 10, such as the OnePlus 7T. We are very excited that Samsung announced an open beta for Android 10 on their devices and started the rollout on October 12th, compared to November 15th last year.

The ROM developer community benefits from improved updatability as well. Mere days after the Android 10 launch, external developers ported it to 15 devices that launched on Android 8 and 9. This work was made much easier thanks to Project Treble, and we are very excited about the potential for open-source development on the OS. We made this even easier by publishing Google-signed Generic System Images (GSIs) and GMS binaries on android.com, as well as posting detailed instructions for developers to try them on their own.

DSU and Project Mainline

In Android 10, we delivered Dynamic System Updates (DSU). For every device launching on Android 10 that supports DSU, developers are able to install Google-signed Generic System Images and boot into them without having to touch the factory ROMs on their devices. We showcased this work at Google I/O, switching painlessly between GSIs and Factory ROMs on Pixel devices.

We also implemented Project Mainline, which allows Google to update directly, via the Play Store, components of the OS that are critical to security and app compatibility. Project Mainline is to the core of the Android OS what Project Treble is to its foundation. It is a dramatic improvement in the velocity of updates of the OS components that fall under its umbrella.

Project Mainline also builds on the work we've done on a less obvious part of Android, called Google Mobile Services (GMS), which has been receiving updates in this way for years. GMS is the part of your Android device that makes it work seamlessly with all of Google's services. Yet another piece, called Webview, is at the core of your browser and every application that interacts with the web. This security- and correctness-critical component also gets updated via Play Store.

Looking Forward

The Android ecosystem is truly vast. There are hundreds of phone manufacturers, dozens of SoC (mobile CPU) models, and thousands of very different devices. Creating an updatability architecture that covers all of them is a complex task. Android is committed to updatability in all forms, whether it’s real-time updates to first- and third-party apps, developer libraries such as Jetpack, or regular security updates for Android devices.

It has been exciting to see the impact of our efforts on updatability. We have a lot more work to do, and we are tirelessly investing on improving updates. I am proud of the progress we all—Android, Google at large, and our many partners—have made so far. I am very optimistic about the future and look forward to sharing our work for the next release of Android.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Celebrating 1 year of Google Play’s Academy for App Success

Posted by Dan Lavelle, Head of Learning Operations, Google Play

One year ago, we introduced the Academy for App Success , an e-learning platform to help apps and games businesses who want to grow on Android and Google Play. In that time we've seen tens of thousands of people register for free learning, complete over 50,000 courses, and provide an average course rating of 4.66 out of 5 stars. Thank you to everyone who has spent time learning about best practices, Play Console features, policies and other aspects that are critical to growing your business - we hope to see more of you in the future.

New content and features

Since the debut of Play Academy, we've been working hard to expand our offering to cover the topics you want to learn about. In this time, we have:

Created and updated 30+ courses
Localized Play Academy in 9 additional languages
Developed tailored content for specific markets, such as India, Indonesia and Korea
Launched content updates to share the best of GDC and Google I/O
Refreshed the visual experience.

We've also been listening to your feedback and have updated Play Academy with content to cover key areas that might interest you:


Google Play policy	Subscription model for games	Track installs, uninstalls, and upgrades

What's next?

Our goal at Play Academy is to provide you with a free learning resource to optimize your use of Play Console features, learn best practices to apply to your app or game business, and stay on the right side of Google Play policy.

Over the coming year, we will continue to create and update content in these key areas, in addition to investing in new learning formats to complement our interactive e-learning content.

Start learning now!

At Google Play, we're looking forward to another great year of learning with you.

It's easy to get started with Play Academy - simply head to g.co/playacademy, sign up for your free account, and choose from over 75 e-learning courses and assessments. While you're there, leave a rating and review on any courses you complete.

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Source: Android Developers Blog

Here’s how to watch the 2019 Android Dev Summit!

We’re less than 24 hours away from kicking off the 2019 Android Dev Summit, broadcasting live from the Google Events Center (MP7) in Sunnyvale, CA on October 23 & 24. We’ll be broadcasting the entire two days of the event live on YouTube, Twitter and on the Android Dev Summit website. Here’s what you need to know:

The keynote, sessions, sandbox and more, kicking off at 10AM PDT

The summit kicks off on October 23 at 10 a.m. PDT with a keynote, where you'll hear from Dave Burke, VP Engineering for Android, Stephanie Cuthbertson, Director of Product Management and others on the present and future of Android development. From there, we'll dive into two days of deep technical content from the Android engineering team, on topics such as Android platform, Android Studio, Android Jetpack, Kotlin, Google Play, and more. The full agenda is here so you can plan your summit experience.

#AskAndroid your pressing questions!

Tweet us your best questions using the hashtag #AskAndroid in the lead-up to the Android Dev Summit. We’ve gathered experts from Jetpack to Kotlin to Android 10, so we’ve got you covered. We’ll be answering your questions live between sessions on the livestream. Plus, we will share updates directly from the Google Events Center to our social channels, so be sure to follow along!

Source: Android Developers Blog

Android Automotive OS updates for developers

Posted by Madan Ankapura, Product Manager, Android

Google’s vision is to bring a safe and seamless connected experience to every car. Since 2017, we have announced collaborations with vehicle manufacturers like Volvo Car Group, General Motors and others to power infotainment systems with Android Automotive OS, Google’s open-source Android platform, and to enable integration of Google technology and services. Now with the reveal of Volvo’s XC40 Recharge and the previously announced Polestar 2, we are making progress on our vision with these brand new, customized infotainment systems that feature real-time updates to the Google Assistant, Google Maps and automotive apps created by Google, and the global developer community.

Volvo XC40 Recharge & its infotainment unit

With more manufacturers adding Android Automotive OS based infotainment systems to their vehicles, app developers have an opportunity to reach even more users with innovative, and drive optimized experiences.

Concept image from GM on Maps & Media integration

Developing & testing media apps on emulator

At Google I/O 2019, we published design guidelines for developing media apps for cars, added wizard support to Android Studio, updated emulator to have car specific controls and the Android Automotive OS emulator system image. These latest features helped Android developers start to design, as well as develop and test their existing media apps to run on Android Automotive OS (review developer documentation here).

Today, we’re announcing that developers can download an updated Android Automotive OS emulator system image that includes the Google Play Store. This means developers no longer have to wait to get their hands on a vehicle, but can design, develop, run apps right within the emulator, and can now test distribution via Play Console by requesting access.

In addition to the apps announced at Google I/O, more media app developers, including Amazon Music, Audioburst and YouTube Music, are adapting their apps for Android Automotive OS. The process of porting existing media apps that support Android Auto to this platform is simple and requires minimal development resources.

Audioburst, Amazon Music and YouTube Music running on the Android Automotive OS emulator

And if you want to learn more about creating apps for Android Automotive OS — join us at Android Dev Summit 2019. Come talk to us in our sandbox, tune in via livestream on YouTube, or post on the automotive-developers Google Group or Stack Overflow using android-automotive tags.

We hope to see you there!

Source: Android Developers Blog

Introducing NDK r21: our first Long Term Support release

Posted by Dan Albert, Android NDK Tech Lead

Android NDK r21 is now in beta! It’s been a longer than usual development cycle (four months since NDK r20), so there’s quite a lot to discuss for this release.

We have the usual toolchain updates, improved defaults for better security and performance, and are making changes to our release process to better accommodate users that need stability without hindering those that want new features.

New Minimum System Requirements

This release comes with new minimum system requirements. Following Android Studio and the SDK, 32-bit Windows is no longer supported. While this change will not affect most developers, this change does have an impact if you use 32-bit versions of Microsoft® Windows®. Linux users must have glibc 2.17 or newer.

Release Cycle Changes and LTS

One release a year will be our Long Term Support (LTS) release for users that want stability more than they need new features. The release will undergo a longer beta cycle before being released, and will receive bug fixes as backports until next year’s LTS release. Generally releasing in Q4, our first LTS release will be NDK r21.

The non-LTS releases each year, which we call the “rolling” release, will be similar to our current process. These will be approximately quarterly releases of our latest set of features, which will only be patched later for critical toolchain fixes. If you want the latest features from Clang and libc++, this is the release for you.

More detail, including the criteria we will use to determine what will be backported, what kinds of bugs will trigger a point release, and the bar we hold each release to can be found documented on our GitHub Wiki.

New Features and Updates

There are quite a lot of new things in this release, resolving bugs and helping you write better, safer code.

We’ve updated GNU Make to version 4.2, which enables --output-sync to avoid interleaving output with error messages. This is enabled by default with ndk-build. This also includes a number of bug fixes, including fixing the pesky CreateProcess errors on Windows.

GDB has been updated to version 8.3, which includes fixes for debugging modern Intel CPUs.

Updated LLVM

As always, we’ve updated LLVM and all of its components (Clang, lld, libc++, etc) which includes many improvements.

The toolchain has been updated to r365631 (the master branch as of 10 July 2019). This includes fixes for quite a few bugs in the previous release, perhaps most importantly LLD no longer hangs when using multithreaded linking on Windows. OpenMP is now available as a dynamic library (and this is the new default behavior, so link with -static-openmp if you want to stick with the static runtime).

A handful of driver improvements have been made to reduce the amount of compiler configuration required by each build system as well. Build system owners should check the updated Build System Maintainers guide.

libc++ has been updated to r369764.

Fortify

Fortify is now enabled by default when using ndk-build or the CMake toolchain file (this includes ExternalNativeBuild users). Fortify enables additional checks in the standard library that can help catch bugs sooner and mitigate security issues. For example, without fortify the following code compiles fine:

    const char src[] = "this string is too long";
    char dst[10];
    strcpy(dst, src);

With fortify, the buffer overflow is diagnosed at compile-time:

    test.cpp:10:18: error: 'strcpy' called with string bigger than buffer
      strcpy(dst, src);
                     ^

It is not always possible for the compiler to detect this issue at compile-time. In those cases, a run-time check will be used instead that will cause the program to abort rather than continue unsafely.

If you’re using a build system other than ndk-build or CMake via the NDK’s toolchain file, this will not be enabled by default. To enable, simply define _FORTIFY_SOURCE=2. The most reliable way to do this is by adding -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 to your compiler flags.

Clang can also statically detect some of these issues by using -Wfortify-source (also new in r21). This is on by default, but it’s recommended to enforce fixing issues with -Werror=fortify-source. Use this in addition to the C library features, not instead of, since the warnings do not cover the same cases as the C library extension, nor can it add run-time checks.

Note that because run-time support is required for fortify and the feature was gradually added to Android over time, the exact set of APIs protected by fortify depends on your minSdkVersion. Fortify is an improvement, but it is not a replacement for good tests, ASan, and writing safe code.

See FORTIFY in Android for an in-depth explanation of fortify.

Other updates

64-bit requirement

Since August 2019, all existing and new apps are now required to support 64-bit before they can be released to Google Play; there’s an extension for a limited set of apps. For more information and help on adding support for 64-bit, see our guide.

Neon by default

Arm code is now built with Neon by default. In a previous release we enabled it conditionally based on minSdkVersion, but given the very small number of devices that don’t support Neon we now enable it unconditionally. This offers improved performance on all 32-bit Arm devices (64-bit Arm always had this, and it does not affect Intel ABIs).

As before, this behavior can be disabled for apps that need to continue supporting devices without Neon. Alternatively, those devices can be blacklisted in the Play Console. See https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/cpu-arm-neon for more information.

Up Next

Have a look at our roadmap to see what we’re working on next. The next few big things coming up are package management and better CMake integration.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Previewing #AndroidDevSummit: Sessions, App, & Livestream Details

Posted by The #AndroidDevSummit team

In two weeks, we'll be welcoming Android developers from around the world at Android Dev Summit 2019, broadcasting live from the Google Events Center (MP7) in Sunnyvale, CA on October 23 & 24. Whether you’re joining us in person or via the livestream, we’ve got a great show planned for you; starting today, you can read more details about the keynote, sessions, codelabs, sandbox, the mobile app, and how online viewers can participate.

The keynote, sessions, sandbox and more, kicking off at 10AM PDT

The summit kicks off on October 23 at 10 a.m. PDT with a keynote, where you'll hear from Dave Burke, VP Engineering for Android, and others on the present and future of Android development. From there, we'll dive into two days of deep technical content from the Android engineering team, on topics such as Android platform, Android Studio, Android Jetpack, Kotlin, Google Play, and more.

The full agenda is now available, so you can start to plan your summit experience. We'll also have demos in the sandbox, hands-on learning with codelabs, plus exclusive content for those watching on the livestream.

Get the Android Dev Summit app on Google Play!

The official app for Android Dev Summit 2019 has started rolling out on Google Play. With the app, you can explore the agenda by searching through topics and speakers. Plan your summit experience by saving events to your personalized schedule. You’ll be able to watch the livestream and find recordings after sessions occur, and more. (By the way, the app is also an Instant app, so with one tap you can try it out first before installing!)

2019 #AndroidDevSummit app

A front-row seat from your desk, and #AskAndroid your pressing questions!

We’ll be broadcasting live on YouTube and Twitter starting October 23 at 10 a.m. PDT. In addition to a front row seat to over 25 Android sessions, there will be exclusive online-only content and an opportunity to have your most pressing Android development questions answered live, broadcast right from the event.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Previewing #AndroidDevSummit: Sessions, App, & Livestream Details

Posted by The #AndroidDevSummit team

The keynote, sessions, sandbox and more, kicking off at 10AM PDT

Get the Android Dev Summit app on Google Play!

2019 #AndroidDevSummit app

A front-row seat from your desk, and #AskAndroid your pressing questions!

Source: Android Developers Blog

Continuous testing with new Android emulator tools

Posted by Lingfeng Yang, Android Studio team

Developers often use the Android Emulator during their day-to-day development to quickly test the latest changes before they are being committed. In addition, developers are increasingly using the emulator in their continuous integration (CI) systems to run a larger suite of automated tests. To better support this use-case, we are open sourcing the Android Emulator Container Scripts and improving the developer experiences around two pain points:

Deployability - finding and running the desired version of Android Emulator.
Debuggability - tracking down bugs from remote instances of Android Emulator.

Deployability

Android supports a wide variety of hardware and software configurations, and the Android Emulator is no different. However, this wide variety can create confusion over environment configurations. How should developers obtain emulators and system images? What drivers are required? How do you run with or without CPU or GPU acceleration? (etc. etc.)

To address this we have launched:

Android Emulator Download Script - This script provides the current up-to-date lists of emulator images (both AOSP and with Google Play Services) as well as emulators binaries (supporting Linux, Mac OS and Windows). You can integrate this with your existing continuous integration system. Going forward, we aim to enhance this service to enable downloading of deprecated versions in addition to the latest versions to make it easier to reproduce historical test results.
Android Emulator Docker image generator - Android system images and the emulator is only one part of the story. For environment, drivers, and pre-installed system dependencies, we put together a Docker image generator. This creates the complete environment in which the Android Emulator runs. After you start up the Docker image, 1) port forwarding and ADB, or 2) gRPC and WebRTC, makes interaction with the emulator possible. Currently, the Docker image generator is designed to work in Linux. We are also looking at Mac OS and Windows hosts, so stay tuned!

To increase reproducibility, the underlying Dockerfile template makes the required command line flags and system dependencies more explicit (and reproducible via building Docker images from them). For hardware acceleration, note the --privileged flag that is passed to run.sh; we assume CPU acceleration is available when running the emulator, and --privileged is needed to run the containers with CPU acceleration (KVM) enabled.

For more details on how to create and deploy the Android Emulator image, go to the README.

Debuggability

When the emulator is running and a test or the emulator fails, it can be difficult to dive into the running environment and diagnose the error. Often, diagnosis requires direct interaction with the virtual device. We provide two mechanisms for direct interaction:

ADB
Remote streaming

In the case of ADB, we allow all commands, such as logcat and shell, by forwarding a particular port from the Docker guest to the host. Because the current port is 5555, we'll need to collect more feedback and do more research on how best to separate ports across different containers.

Remote streaming

Security note: With remote streaming, keep in mind that once the service is started, anyone who can connect to your computer on port 80/443 can interact with the emulator. So be careful with running this on a public server!

With remote streaming, you can run the emulator in a container, which is as interactive as running locally. Running the emulator in a container makes it easier to debug issues that can be hard to discover using ADB commands. You can access the emulator using a browser with WebRTC, which is used to stream the video, and gRPC, which is used to send mouse and keyboard events to the emulator. Remote streaming requires three containers:

A container that hosts the latest emulator
A container with an Envoy web proxy needed for gRPC
A container with nginx to serve the React web app

You can compose the Docker containers together using docker-compose, as described in the README. The containers bind to port 80 and 443, so make sure you do not have a web server running. A self-signed certificate will be offered if you point the browser to the host. If you point your browser to the host you should see something like the image below:

Again, keep in mind that anyone who can connect to your host can interact with the emulator. So be careful with running this on a public server!

Let’s scale testing!

Testing can seem to be a tax on development time. However, as many seasoned developers have seen, proper automated testing can increase development velocity as the code base becomes bigger and more complex. Continuous testing should give you confidence that the change you make won’t break your app.