How we’re restoring native habitats in Silicon Valley

Vast oak woodlands punctuated with lush willow groves once stretched from Palo Alto to San Jose and beyond, long before the rise of Silicon Valley.

“Centuries of agricultural intensification and urbanization have transformed these landscapes,” says Erin Beller, Google’s ecology program lead who studied Silicon Valley’s ecological history and restoration potential for her PhD. “We’ve lost over 99% of these valuable native habitats.”

Now, Google’s real estate and ecology teams are working to bring nature back into the built environment — in part, by restoring critical habitats like oak woodlands and willow groves across our Bay Area campuses. The goal is to revive the area’s ecological heritage and bolster the human experience while creating thriving, functional landscapes for a biodiverse constellation of species.

Already, the team has restored over 15 acres on Google’s campuses and in the surrounding urban landscape, in partnership with local NGOs, ecology experts and government agencies. This work includes everything from creating welcoming habitat patches for pollinators like native bees and monarch butterflies to partnering on larger projects like restoring the Charleston Retention Basin.

  • An orange and black monarch butterfly rests on milkweed.

    A monarch butterfly on narrow-leaf milkweed on Google’s Sunnyvale campus. We’ve committed $1 million to help California’s monarch butterfly conservation efforts, adding more habitat on our campuses and supporting the creation of 600 acres of habitat across the state.

  • A white great egret bird stands in its nest at the Shorebird Way rookery.

    A great egret standing in its nest at the Shorebird Way rookery, the largest in the South Bay area. Google protects the rookery by closing the road to vehicles during nesting season each year. Hundreds of snowy egrets, great egrets and black-crowned night herons return annually to nest and raise their young.

  • Two people wearing backpacks and baseball caps walk along a path between native plants.

    Two members of the ecology team walk along a path between native plants in the South Bay campus. Google’s real estate and ecology teams are working to bring nature back into the built environment.

Together these efforts drive landscape-scale restoration of historical ecosystems like oak woodlands, willow groves, meadows and grasslands, and creek and wetland habitats. Oaks and willows are especially important to Beller’s team because they play a defining role in sustaining ecosystems. Both support a dizzying array of wildlife and have great potential to adapt to California’s changing climate. “Oaks and willows have superpowers,” says Beller.

Oak canopies: host to a community of creatures

Iconic trees of the California landscape, oaks once dominated Silicon Valley. Oaks are drought-tolerant, fire-resistant, and efficient at removing air pollution and absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.

Oak woodland ecosystems sustain some of the highest plant and animal diversity in California, supporting 2,000 additional plant species and around 5,000 insect species. Hundreds more birds, mammals and other wildlife rely on the richness of oak woodlands for food, shade and shelter.

  • A brown juvenile bushtit bird rests on a tree branch.

    A juvenile bushtit pictured at the Charleston Retention Basin. Insectivorous birds, like the bushtit and oak titmouse, feed on insects they find in oaks. These smaller birds are prey for predators like raptors and northern pygmy owls.

  • A Western bluebird looks left while sitting in front of oak tree leaves.

    A Western bluebird perched beside an oak tree at Google’s Bay View campus.

  • A round yellow wasp gall grows on the branches of an oak tree.

    A cynipid wasp gall on an oak by the Charleston Retention Basin. More than 130 species of cynipid wasps depend on Silicon Valley’s oaks to build their galls. Galls are an overgrowth of plant tissue produced in response to chemicals secreted by wasp larvae. Most wasp galls cause little or no lasting damage to oaks, and the insects that cause them help form complex food webs that are partially responsible for the amazing biodiversity found in oak habitats.

  • Three ecology team members in neon orange vests study trees in front of a building.

    Young oaks and native understory planting at Charleston East. In the next decade, Google estimates that the diverse network of oak species at Charleston East will provide 80,000 square feet of connected tree canopy.

  • A gray squirrel sits at the base of an oak tree, looking right.

    Oak leaves and acorns are consumed by herbivores like red and eastern gray squirrels (pictured) and birds like the California scrub jay, which consumes and disperses acorns, helping the trees to propagate.

Oaks can bring powerful benefits to urban areas, like creating wildlife corridors and mitigating the urban heat island effect. Already, Google has planted hundreds of oak trees across our Mountain View and Sunnyvale campuses, with plans to plant hundreds more. These efforts follow guidelines for tree density and spacing laid out in "Re-Oaking Silicon Valley," a study Beller co-authored with her extended team that also serves as a resource for other businesses and organizations.

Wetland willows: a stop for migratory birds

Whereas oaks thrive on well-drained valley soils, willows flourish in low-lying areas where groundwater is close to the surface. Because willows tap this groundwater, they stay lush and green well into the dry season, reducing the need for irrigation.

Like oaks, willows sequester carbon once mature. They’re also critical for insect biodiversity and can provide high-quality food for insectivorous birds and other wildlife. Silicon Valley has lost nearly all of its willow groves, which once served as essential stopovers for migratory birds heading south.

  • A water basin reflects the sun in front of two low round buildings at the Bay View campus.

    The Google Bay View campus incorporates stormwater retention basins designed to support willows, so the trees can provide habitat for migratory bird species and longer-term residents like pollinators, lizards, songbirds and other small animals. (Iwan Baan for Google)

  • A willow flycatcher bird rests on a tree branch, looking right.

    Songbirds like willow flycatchers (pictured) and Wilson’s warblers rest and refuel among the valley’s willows. They spend several days gorging on huge quantities of insects before continuing on their long journey to Central America.

  • Two field researchers write in notebooks while sitting in a fenced-in area surrounded by greenery and trees.

    Google’s field researchers in the shade of a willow grove at the Charleston Retention Basin, a partnership between Google, the City of Mountain View, HCP Life Science and LinkedIn. Google removed more than 100 parking spaces to help create more extensive willow floodplains, cottonwood groves and other habitats here.

Thanks to Google’s willow grove restoration initiatives like those around the Charleston Retention Basin and on our Bayview and Charleston East campuses, there are more places for migratory songbirds to rest and find food to replenish their energy en route.

At the Charleston Retention Basin — home to one of the largest willow groves in the region — there are new trails, seats and lookout points so people can immerse themselves in the outdoors and appreciate the biodiversity around them.

Bringing nature back beyond the Bay

In addition to projects in the Bay Area, Google’s ecology team has urban greening projects in the works across several of our campuses, including in the heart of London, Munich and New York.

“Nature and people should be able to flourish together in the campuses and communities that Google calls home,” says Beller.

This work is part of a bigger global movement. The idea that nature in cities is crucial for both people and wildlife is taking root, and high-profile projects like London’s National Park City to The High Line of New York have brought it into the public consciousness.

“We know that access to nature has profound benefits for human health and wellbeing,” says Kate Turpin, director of design performance for Google’s real estate development team. “It can be a place of refuge, from a hot day or the busy pace of working life.”

A researcher wearing a blue shirt and green baseball cap holds a wooden measuring stick next to milkweed plants.

A field researcher measures the height of native narrow-leaf milkweed on the Google campus, as part of biodiversity monitoring efforts.

To help scale their ideas, Beller’s team supports open-source scientific research, from local guidelines for native planting in Silicon Valley for institutions and residents to academic research about the value of urban nature. “From backyards to businesses, we hope everyone will pitch in to bring nature back into cities,” says Beller. They have also partnered with local scientists to monitor these new habitats on campus, using data to measure the impact of native landscaping on bird and insect biodiversity and inform future campus restoration efforts.

The early signs in the Bay Area are promising. “I can step out of the office and lose myself among the willow groves around the Charleston Retention Basin — enjoy a walk in the shade, spot birds and butterflies, and hear the hum of a functioning ecosystem all around me,” says Beller. “I’ve spent a large part of my career as an ecologist reflecting on what was. It’s awe-inspiring to think about what could be.”

Read Article

Doing our part for California’s monarch butterflies

We’re taking steps to help address the threat facing California’s monarch butterflies by providing grants and habitat on our campuses.

Read Article

Creating new artistic territories through advanced technologies

Art and technology have a complex but substantial history of influencing one another. Today, technology is increasingly impacting how art is made, displayed and sold — playing a fundamental part in its development and evolution. It’s also giving rise to questions like “How can machine learning algorithms, ambient sensors and new forms of human machine interaction transcend creativity and enable new perceptions?” and “What dialogues will those new tools for expression create?”

Focusing on the intersection of art and technology, we invited four cutting edge creatives from various disciplines — Christelle Koché, Refik Anadol, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini and Cyril Lancelin — to experiment with Soli, a miniature radar that captures human motions of varying scales, from your heartbeat to body movement.

“Do hoodies dream of beautiful sunrises?” is the name of the collaboration we undertook with KOCHE, a nod to Philip K. Dick and his dystopian universe. It is a way to ask — as a thought experiment — can clothes be sensitive to the beautiful environment that surrounds them? What is the future of clothes and can we redefine the interaction between clothes, humans and machines?

Driven by those questions, KOCHE created four hybrid pieces combining artisanship, couture and technology, which can transform by reacting to sensors or touch. KOCHE’s vision was to seamlessly blend technology with craftsmanship. In a way, most of the electronics had to be hidden, leaving only the luminous interactive elements, almost as if the elements themselves were part of the textile. For our team at ATAP, this meant making the driving electronics invisible, flexible and robust enough to withstand body movements, and supporting KOCHE’s application of craftsmanship techniques regarding the integration of luminous components.

A model walks the runway at Paris Fashion Week

A model walking in front of Soli radars with data visualization on an LED wall.

We used Soli within the scenography of KOCHE’s Paris Fashion Week show to give it a deeply interactive dimension. We imagined different levels of interaction between the models, the clothes, the audience and the show space; each influencing the others with its presence alone or movement. In this way, the garment becomes connected to its environment; the garment transforms, and is transformed by, its environment. Together with KOCHE, we created visuals that illustrate Soli’s unique and abstract perception of its environment — a digital shadow, as perceived by Soli.

Upcoming collaborations with Refik Anadol, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini and Cyril Lancelin will be revealed in 2023. Stay tuned for more magic!

Google Ads API Video Roundup

The Google Ads Developers Channel is your video source for release notes, best practices, new feature integrations, code walkthroughs, and video tutorials. Check out some of the recently released and popular videos and playlists below, and remember to subscribe to our channel to stay up to date with the latest video content.

Google Ads API Best Practices - Error Handling and Debugging
In this episode of the Google Ads API Best Practices Series, we discuss how to handle errors that may occur when interacting with the Google Ads API, along with tools that may help you debug your applications, such as logging and the REST interface.
Meet the Team with David Wihl
In this video, David Wihl shares a bit about his role as a Developer Relations Engineer at Google and discusses his work in supporting the Performance Max campaign API integration.

[Live Demo] Building a Google Ads API Web App
Getting started with the Google Ads API? In this 8-episode series, we take a deep dive into developing web apps with the Google Ads API, with a focus on the OAuth flow, by building a multi-tenant app entirely from scratch.

Logging & Monitoring
This miniseries covers the basics of adding logging and monitoring to your Google Ads API integration and then goes into more advanced topics, with a special focus on Cloud tooling. Google Ads Query Language (GAQL)
In this series, we cover everything you need to know about the Google Ads Query Language to make reporting requests against the Google Ads API. We begin with the basics and build in subsequent episodes to cover various nuances of GAQL. We even dive into the various tools available to help you structure your queries. This playlist will equip you with the information you need to know to become a GAQL power user. For additional topics, including Authentication and Authorization and Working with REST, check out the Google Ads API Developer Series.

As always, feel free to reach out to us with any questions via the Google Ads API forum or at [email protected].
- Devin Chasanoff, on behalf of the Google Ads API Team

What’s new from Android, at Android Dev Summit ‘22

Posted by Matthew McCullough, Vice President, Product Management, Android Developer

Just now, we kicked off the first day of Android Dev Summit in the Bay Area, where my team and I covered a number of ways we’re helping you build excellent experiences for users by leveraging Modern Android Development, which can help you extend those apps across the many devices Android has to offer - across all screen sizes from the one on your wrist, to large screens like a tablet or foldables.

Here’s a recap of what we covered, and don’t forget to watch the full keynote!

Modern Android Development: Compose October ‘22

A few years ago, we introduced a set of libraries, tools, services, and guidance we call Modern Android Development, or MAD. From Android Studio, Kotlin, Jetpack libraries and powerful Google & Play Services, our goal is to make it faster and easier for you to build high quality apps across all Android devices.

For building rich, beautiful UIs, we introduced Jetpack Compose several years ago - this is our recommended UI framework for new Android applications.

We’re introducing a Gradle Bill of Materials (BOM) specifying the stable version of each Compose library. The first BOM release, Compose October 22, contains Material Design 3 components, lazy staggered grids, variable fonts, pull to refresh, snapping in lazy lists, draw text in canvas, URL annotations in text, hyphenation, and LookAheadLayout. The team at Lyft has benefited from using Compose. They shared “Over 90% of all new feature code is now developed in Compose.”

We want Compose to help you take advantage of the entire Android ecosystem of devices, Compose for Wear OS hit its 1.0 stable release several weeks ago making it the recommended way to build UI for Wear. Today we announced that we’re growing the offering with the first alpha release of Compose for Android TV. Components like featured carousel and immersive list are already available, with more components coming soon. So if you're learning Android or starting a new app, Jetpack Compose is ready for you!

Modern Android Development comes to life in Android Studio, our official IDE that provides powerful tools for building apps on every type of Android device. Today, we’re releasing a number of new features for you to test out, including updated templates that are Compose by default and feature Material 3, Live Edit on by default for Compose, Composition Tracing, Android SDK Upgrade Assistant, App Quality Insights Improvements and more. Download the latest preview version of Android Studio Flamingo to try out all the features and to give us feedback.


Moving image of Android and Jetpack updates with customer feedback

Wear OS: the time is now!

A key device that users are turning to is the smallest and most personal — the watch. We launched our joint platform – Wear OS – with Samsung just last year, and this year, we have seen 3X as many device activations, with amazing new devices hitting the market, like Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 and Google Pixel Watch. Compose for Wear OS, which makes it faster and easier to build Apps for Wear OS, went to 1.0 this summer, and is our recommended approach for building user interfaces for Wear OS apps. More than 20 UI components specifically designed for Wearables, with built-in material theming and accessibility.

Today, we’re sharing updated templates for Wear OS in Android Studio, as well as a stable Android R emulator system image for WearOS.

With personalized data from a wearable, it’s important to keep the data completely private and safe, which is why we’ve been working on a solution to make this easier – Health Connect. It’s an API that we built in close collaboration with Samsung for storing and sharing health data - all with a single place for users to easily manage permissions.

Developers who invest in Wear OS are seeing big results: Todoist increased their install growth rate by 50% since rebuilding their app for Wear 3, and Outdooractive reduced development time by 30% using Compose for Wear OS. Now is the time to bring a unique, engaging experience to your users on Wear OS!

Making your app work great on tablets & large screens

As you heard earlier this year: Google is all in on tablets, foldables, and ChromeOS. With amazing new hardware–like Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4, Lenovo P12 Tab Pro, and Google’s upcoming Pixel Tablet, there has never been a better time to review your apps and get them ready for large screens. We’ve been hard at work, with updates to Android, improved Google apps and exciting changes to the Play store making optimized Tablet apps more discoverable.

We’ve made it easier than ever to test your app on the large screen in Android Studio Electric Eel, including resizable and desktops emulators and visual linting to help you adhere to best practices on any sized screen.

We’ve also heard that we can help you by providing more design and layout guidance for these devices. To help today, we added new layout guidance for apps by vertical to developer.android.com, as well as developer guidance for Canonical layouts with samples.

Apps that invest in large screen features are seeing that work pay off when it comes to engagement; take Concepts, which enables amazing stylus interactions like drawing and shape guides for ChromeOS and stylus devices, and saw a 70% higher usage for tablets compared to phones!

Be on the lookout for more updates on our improvements to Android Studio, Window Manager Jetpack, and more with the Form Factors track, broadcast live on November 9.



Making it easier to take advantage of platform features in Android 13

At the heart of a successful platform is the operating system, and Android 13, released in August, brings developer enhancements too many facets of the platform, including personalization, privacy, security, connectivity, and media.

For example per-app language preferences, improve the experience for multilingual users, allowing people to experience their device in different languages in different contexts.

The new Photo picker is a permission free way to allow the user to browse and select photos and videos they explicitly want to share with your app, a great example of how Android is focused on privacy.

To help you target new API levels, we're introducing the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant tool within the latest preview of Android Studio Flamingo, which gives you step-by-step documentation for the most important changes to look for when updating the target SDK of your app.

These are just a few examples of how we're making it easier than ever to adapt your app to platform changes, while enabling you to take advantage of the latest features Android has to offer.

Connecting with you around the world at Android Dev Summit

This is just the first day of Android Dev Summit - where we kicked off with the keynote and dove into our first track on Modern Android Development, we’ve still got a lot more over the coming weeks. Tune in on November 9, when we livestream our next track: Form Factors. Our final technical track will be Platform, livestreamed on November 14.

If you’ve got a burning question, tweet us using #AskAndroid; we’ll be wrapping up each track livestream with a live Q&A from the team, so you can tune in and hear your question answered live.
Modern Android Development Track @ Android Dev Summit October 24, 2022 at 9:00 AM PT Agenda 9:00 AM Keynote, 9:50 AM Custom Layouts and Graphics in Compose, 10:10 AM Making Apps Blazing Fast with Baseline Profiles, 10:30 State of the Art of Compose Tooling, 10:50 State Holders and State Production in the UI Layer, 11:10 AM 5 ways Compose Improves UI Testing, 11:15 AM 5 Android Studio Features You Don't Want to Miss, 11:30 AM Pre-recorded MAD Technical Talks, 12:20 PM Where to Hoist that State in Compose, 12:25 PM Material You in Compose Apps, 12:30 PM PM Compose Modifiers Deep Dive, 12:50 Practical Room Migrations, 12:55 PM Type Safe, Multi-Module Best Practices with Navigation, 1:00 PM What's New in Android Build, 1:20 PM From Views to Compose: Where Can I Start?, 1:25 PM Test at Scale with Gradle Managed Devices, 1:35 PM MAD #AskAndroid. Broadcast live on d.android.com/dev-summit & YouTube.
Form Factors Track @ Android Dev Summit November 9, 2022 Sessions: Deep Dive into Wear OS App Architecture, Build Better Uls Across Form Factors with Android Studio, Designing for Large Screens: Canonical Layouts and Visual Hierarchy Compose: Implementing Responsive UI for Large Screens, Creating Helpful Fitness Experiences with Health Services and Health Connect, The Key to Keyboard and Mouse Support across Tablets and ChromeOS Your Camera App on Different Form Factors, Building Media Apps on Wear OS, Why and How to Optimize Your App for ChromeOS. Broadcast live on d.android.com/dev-summit & YouTube.
Platform Track @ Android Dev Summit November 14, 2022 Sessions: Migrate Your Apps to Android 13, Presenting a High-quality Media Experience for all Users, Improving Your Social Experience Quality with Android Camera, Building for a Multilingual World Everything About Storage on Android, Migrate to Play Billing Library 5: More flexible subscriptions on Google Play, Designing a High Quality App with the Latest Android Features, Hardware Acceleration for ML on-device, Demystifying Attestation, Building Accessibility Support for Compose. Broadcast live on d.android.com/dev-summit & YouTube.

This year, we’re also really excited to get the opportunity to meet with developers around the world in person, including today in the Bay Area. On November 9, Android Dev Summit moves to London. And the fun will continue in Asia in December with more roadshow stops: in Tokyo on December 16 (more details to come) at Android Dev Summit with Google DevFest, and in Bangalore in mid-December (you can express interest to join here).

Whether you’re tuning in online, or joining us in-person around the world, it’s feedback from developers like you that help us make Android a better platform. We thank you for the opportunity to work together with you, building excellent apps and delighting users across all of the different devices Android has to offer - enjoy your 2022 Android Dev Summit!

Android Dev Summit ‘22: What’s new in Jetpack

Posted by Amanda Alexander, Product Manager

Android Jetpack is a key component of Modern Android Development. It is a suite of over 100 libraries, tools and guidance to help developers follow best practices, reduce boilerplate code, and write code that works consistently across Android versions and devices. By using Android Jetpack to improve your productivity, you can focus on building unique features for your app. 

Most apps on Google Play use Jetpack as a key component of their app architecture, in fact over 90% of the top 1000 apps use Android Jetpack.

At ADS this week we released updates to three major areas of Jetpack:

  1. Architecture Libraries and Guidance
  2. Application Performance
  3. User Interface Libraries and Guidance

We’ll take a moment to expand on each of these areas and then conclude with some additional updates that we also shipped.

Let’s go…


Architecture Libraries and Guidance

App architecture libraries and components ensure that apps are robust, testable, and maintainable.

Managing tasks with WorkManager

The WorkManager library makes it easy to schedule deferrable, asynchronous tasks that must be run reliably for instance uploading backups or analytics. These APIs let you create a task and hand it off to WorkManager to run when the work constraints are met.

WorkManager 2.8.0-alpha04 has been updated with the ability to update WorkRequests in a non-intrusive way, preserving original enqueue time, chaining and more. It makes changes to Worker’s constraints much easier, e.g. if constraints need to be changed from one version of an application to another or via configuration set by server-side. Previously, it was possible to achieve only by canceling already scheduled workers and rescheduling them again. However, this approach was very disruptive: already running workers could have been canceled, cadence of periodic workers could have been broken, and the whole chains of workers required reconstruction if one of them needed an update. Now using the update method or ExistingPeriodicWorkPolicy.UPDATE developers don’t have to worry about any of these issues. 


Data Persistence

Most applications need to persist local state - whether it be caching results, managing local lists of user enter data, or powering data returned in the UI.  Room is the recommended data persistence layer which provides an abstraction layer over SQLite, allowing for increased usability and safety over the platform.

In Room 2.5.0-alpha03, we added a new shortcut annotation, @Upsert, which attempts to insert an entity when there is no uniqueness conflict or update the entity if there is a conflict. Moreover, all of Room runtime APIs along with androidx.sqlite have been converted to Kotlin, creating a better experience for Kotlin users such as strict nullability and opening the door to support other Kotlin language features. 


Android 13 Activity APIs, now backward compatible

The Activity library includes the ComponentActivity class, a base class built on top of the Android framework’s Activity class which provides APIs that enable Jetpack Compose, other Architecture Components, and support for backporting new features introduced in Android 13 with Activity 1.6.1.

By using ComponentActivity directly, or either of its subclasses of FragmentActivity or AppCompatActivity, you can use a single API to pick images via the Photo Picker when it is available with an automatic fallback to the Storage Access Framework to allow support back to Android 4.4 (API 19).

You’ll also be set up for the future with support for the Predictive back gesture introduced in Android 13 simply by upgrading to Activity 1.6.1. The Activity APIs provide a single API for custom back navigation that works back to API 14 and is fully compatible with opting in to predictive back gestures.


Testing Pagination with the Paging Testing library

The Paging library provides support for loading very large data sets. To get the most of Paging, the integration includes multiple layers of your application - your repository layer, ViewModel layer, and your UI.

Paged data flows from the PagingSource or RemoteMediator components in the repository layer to the Pager component in the ViewModel layer. Then the Pager component exposes a Flow of PagingData to the PagingDataAdapter in the UI layer.
To make it easier to test that integration, Paging 3.2.0-alpha03 introduces a new paging-testing artifact with test specific APIs to make it possible to test each layer in isolation. This first release focuses on the repository layer and specifically around testing a custom PagingSource via the new TestPager APIs to ensure you can test your paging sources in different scenarios that are harder to reproduce with integration tests.


New Architecture Documentation

Investing in Architecture is important to improve the quality of your app by making it more robust, testable, maintainable, and scalable. That's why our recommendations on Architecture keep growing! In fact, they've grown so much we released a new Architecture recommendations page that consolidates and centralizes important best practices you can find in our docs.

The team recently released new guidance on modularization. The guide is split into two parts: 

The UI layer docs got two new pages:

  • The state holders and UI state page explains the different types of state holders you can find in the UI layer and which implementation you should use depending on the type of logic to perform. 
  • The state production page that shows best practices about how to model and expose UI state depending on the sources of state change. 

Due to popular demand, the UI events page has been updated with examples of Navigation UI events. We also released new Navigation guidance about providing runtime type safety to the Kotlin DSL and Navigation Compose.

Lastly, if you need to make your app work offline, we got you covered. The build an offline-first app guide helps you design your app to properly handle reads and writes, and deal with sync and conflict resolution in a device with no Internet connectivity.


New ViewModel Documentation

This updated guidance is designed to make it easier to understand when ViewModels are the right tool to reach for when building your UI layer.


Application Performance

Using performance libraries allows you to build performant apps and identify optimizations to maintain high performance, resulting in better end-user experiences. 


Improving Start-up Times

App speed can have a big impact on a user’s experience, particularly when using apps right after installation. To improve that first time experience, we are continuing to enhance Baseline Profiles. Baseline Profiles allow apps and libraries to provide the Android run-time with metadata about code path usage, which it uses to prioritize ahead-of-time compilation. This profile data is aggregated across libraries and lands in an app’s APK as a baseline.prof file, which is then used at install time to partially pre-compile the app and its statically-linked library code. This can make your apps load faster and reduce dropped frames the first time a user interacts with an app. 

With AGP 7.3, baseline profile tooling is fully stable, so you don't need alpha dependencies to get a 30%+ performance boost to your app's initial launch and scroll after each app update. 

In profileinstaller:1.3.0-alpha01, ProfileVerifier allows you to inspect profile compilation in the field, and starting in Android Studio Flamingo Canary 6, the Studio APK Inspector now shows the contents of your APK's baseline profiles.


Accurate reporting of startup metrics

Startup metrics are an important part of measuring your app’s performance, but the system (and the Benchmark libraries!) need a signal that marks the completion of the startup phase. That signal is the Activity’s call to reportFullyDrawn(). Activity 1.7.0-alpha01 added new APIs in the form of the FullyDrawnReporter APIs that allows multiple components to report when they are ready for interaction. ComponentActivity will wait for all components to complete before calling reportFullyDrawn() on your behalf.

These APIs are encouraged to enable:

  • Signaling the Android Runtime when startup completes, to ensure all of the code run during a multi-frame startup sequence is included and prioritized for background compilation.
  • Signaling Macrobenchmark and Play Vitals when your application should be considered fully drawn for startup metrics, so you can track performance.

Two Activity Compose APIs, ReportDrawnWhen and ReportDrawnAfter, have been added to make it more convenient to use the FullyDrawnReporter from individual composables.


Recomposition Tracing

We recently launched the first alpha of Jetpack Compose Composition Tracing, a tool that allows you to see composable functions in the Android Studio system trace profiler. This feature combines the benefits of low intrusiveness from system tracing with method tracing levels of detail in your compositions. By adding a dependency on Compose Runtime Tracing, you will be able to see traces of your recomposition call stack in Android Studio Flamingo Canary 5 system traces and click on them to navigate straight to the code! You can read more about the feature and how to set it up in your project here.
UI screenshot of composables in the system trace
Composables in the system trace

User Interface Libraries and Guidance


Jetpack Compose

Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern toolkit for building native UI, has launched the Compose October ‘22 release which includes many performance improvements and adds support for staggered grids, drawing text directly to canvas, and pull to refresh. We also published our first Bill of Materials (BOM) to simplify the process of adding Compose library versions to your Gradle dependencies. Check out the What’s New in Jetpack Compose blog post to learn more.


Wear Tiles Material Library

Tiles for Wear OS give users glanceable access to information and actions. To help you create tiles, we launched the Tiles Material library, which includes built-in support for Material Design for Wear OS.

The included components are:

  • Button - a clickable, circular-shaped object, with either icon, text or image with 3 predefined sizes.
  • Chip - a clickable, stadium-shaped object that can contain an icon, primary and secondary labels, and has fixed height and customizable width.
  • CompactChip & TitleChip - two variations of the standard Chip that have smaller and larger heights, respectively, and can contain one line of text.
  • CircularProgressIndicator - a colored arc around the edge of the screen with the given start and end angles, which can describe a full or partial circle with the full progress arc behind it.
  • Text - a text element which uses the recommended Wear Material typography styles.

common tile components. a round icon with a pencil labelled 'button'. a full width rectangle with rounded corners and text labelled 'chip'. similar components, one larger and one smaller, labelled 'title chip' and 'compact chip' respectively. a circle path filled 75% clockwise labelled 'circular progress indicator' and finally text labelled 'text with recommended typography pre-set'

In addition to components, there are several recommended tile layouts within Material guidelines. Read more about Wear OS Tiles Material Library in this blog.

 

Add Splash Screen to more devices

The core SplashScreen library brings the new Android 12 splash screen to all devices from API 23. Using the splash screen library, your application doesn't need any custom SplashScreen Activity and leverages the right APIs for a fast launch of your application. To use it, simply follow the steps outlined in our guide. For more information about the Android 12 splash screen, visit the official documentation.

 

Other key updates


Camera 

The CameraX library makes it easier to add camera capabilities to your app. In 1.2.0-beta01, a new library camera-mlkit-vision was added. It enables an easy integration of CameraX with many MLKit features, including barcode scanning, face detection, text detection, etc. You can find the sample code here. We also added a new experimental Zero-Shutter Lag API which optimizes capture pipeline to have better latency while keeping good image quality. 


Annotation

The Annotation library exposes metadata that helps tools and other developers understand your app's code. It provides familiar annotations like @NonNull that pair with lint checks to improve the correctness and usability of your code.

Annotation 1.5 stable release has been fully migrated to Kotlin sources, resulting in support for Kotlin-specific target use sites and other Kotlin-compatible annotation features.


Kotlin Multiplatform

We have been experimenting with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile from Jetbrains to enable code sharing across platforms. We have experimental previews of the Collections and DataStore libraries for apps targeting Android and iOS and we would like your feedback! Read more here. 


This was a brief tour of all the key changes in Jetpack over the past few months. For more details on each Jetpack library, check out the AndroidX release notes, quickly find relevant libraries with the API picker and watch the Google ADS talks for additional highlights.

What’s new in Jetpack Compose

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer

We launched Jetpack Compose over a year ago, and have been busy improving it ever since. We’ve added new features and invented powerful tools to make your experience developing Android UI as productive, intuitive and fun as possible. So, if you're starting a new app, it's time to write it with Compose! With Material Design 3 support, new Bill Of Materials, Compose WearOS Stable and Android TV (alpha), Compose Camp, and many other pieces of news… It's an exciting release!

Compose in the Community

In the last year, we’ve seen many companies developing with Compose at scale, implementing new features and migrating screens from views to Compose. For example, we talked to the engineers at Lyft, who told us that over 90% of their new feature code is written in Compose, and moving to Compose made their code much simpler and easier to maintain. They also shared “We rewrote the button component in our app using Compose. Before it required 800 lines of code across three files plus 17 different XML files, and it is now down to a single Kotlin file with 300 lines of code. This is a 60% reduction in the Kotlin code alone“. The team at Zepeto has also been implementing Compose across many features, and are enjoying the experience, as “Compose simplified our UI layer logic, making it easier to understand code written by my colleagues.”
It’s great to see how these teams experience faster development cycles, and also feel their UI code is more concise and readable. And they’re not the only ones. Since this year’s Google I/O, the number of top 1000 apps on Google Play using Compose has increased by 50%! To help your team follow in the footsteps of the teams at Lyft, Zepeto, and others, we published a guide on How to Adopt Compose for your Team. It outlines how and where to start, and shows the areas of development where Compose can bring huge added value.


Compose, October ‘22 release

Today we’re releasing a new stable version of Compose, with some exciting features and news.

First of all, we’ve heard from you how it can be daunting to track versions across different artifacts that might go on different release schedules, so we’re now publishing, together with every Stable release of any of the Compose artifacts, a Bill of Materials, or BOM, to make your life easier.

Our first BOM release, Compose October ‘22, brings support for Staggered Grids, drawing Text directly to Canvas, Pull to Refresh, as well as performance improvements and bug fixes.


Compose Bill of Materials

A BOM is a Maven module that declares a set of libraries with their versions. It will greatly simplify the way you define Compose library versions in your Gradle dependencies block, especially now that we moved the various Jetpack Compose libraries to independent versioning schemes. Instead of defining each version separately, which can become cumbersome and prone to errors when library versions start to differ, you now only need to define one BOM version and all Compose library versions will be extracted from that. We will publish a new version of the BOM every time a Compose artifact has a new stable release, so moving from stable release to stable release is going to be much simpler.

dependencies {
    // Import the Compose BOM
    implementation platform('androidx.compose:compose-bom:2022.10.00')

    // Declare dependencies for the desired Compose libraries without versions
    implementation 'androidx.compose.foundation:foundation'
    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.compose.ui:ui-test-junit4'

    ...
}


We’ve added the instructions on how to add the Compose BOM to our Quick start guide. Note that you can still choose to define your dependencies using hard-coded versions. The BOM is added as a useful way to simplify dependencies and make upgrades easier.
    

Modifiers on overdrive

Behind the scenes, we’re always working on improving Compose performance. The October ‘22 release includes a major refactor of how Modifiers work under the hood. While you will not notice anything changing in the APIs, this refactor paves the way for greatly improving Modifier performance. Learn more about the rationale behind the changes, and what’s planned for the near future in the ADS talk Compose Modifiers deep dive.


Popup & Dialog elevation change

Accessibility is always a first-class citizen for Compose, and this release contains a behavior change that helps fix an Accessibility bug with Popups and Dialogs: their maximum elevation is decreased from 30dp to 8dp. Your app will be impacted only if it uses a custom dialog or popup implementation with an elevation higher than 8dp. The release notes contain more information about the change, including a way to override the new behavior as an interim solution (keep in mind that we always recommend using 8dp maximum when customizing popups or dialogs).


New features

We added a lot of new functionality to Compose. Here are some highlights:

Compose Material 3 stable

Today we also announce the first stable release of the Compose Material 3 library! You can build an app using Compose and theme it according to Material Design 3, our latest iteration of Material Design. Use Material Design 3 to further customize your app’s colors, typography and shapes to make your brand stand out! The library contains fresh and updated versions of many UI components, such as buttons, cards, checkboxes, switches, navigation bars, drawers, and many more, with support for others on its way. See a list of all the supported components in the documentation and learn more in this blog post.

To help you adopt Material 3 check out our new migration guide with clear guidance on how Material 2 concepts translate to Material 3. The default template in Android Studio Flamingo now uses Material 3, to get you up and running in no time. We’ve also updated many of our sample apps, tutorials, templates, and codelabs to use Material 3 so you can learn as you go!

New tools

Developing your app using Jetpack Compose is much easier with the new and improved tools around it. We’ve added tons of new features to Android Studio to improve your workflow and efficiency:

Android Studio Dolphin is the latest stable release, bringing you:

  • Animation Coordination
  • Multipreview annotations
  • Recomposition counts in Layout Inspector

Android Studio Electric Eel contains beta features, like:

  • Live Edit (experimental)
  • Composition rendering highlighting
  • Configuring Preview devices
  • Live updates in Previews

Android Studio Flamingo contains canary features such as:

  • New project templates use Compose and Material 3 by default
  • Live Edit turned on by default
  • Improved composition tracing to help you better inspect performance issues.

Relay

Today we also launch the first alpha version of Relay, a design-to-code solution for improving designer-developer collaboration. Designers create UI components using the Figma plugin, and developers use the Android Studio plugin to automatically use these components in their apps. The generated components are composable functions and can be integrated directly into your Compose app. Learn more about Relay in the documentation.


Compose on WearOS, Large Screens and TV

In July we released the first Stable version of Wear Compose, ready to build production apps. Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building UIs for Wear OS apps. We’ve included over twenty Compose UI components that were designed specifically for Wearables, like TimeText, PositionIndicator, and ScalingLazyColumn.

We’re also continuing to make it easier to design, develop, and test apps for large screens such as foldables, tablets, and Chrome OS. The material3-window-size-class library graduated to Stable, giving you a set of opinionated viewport breakpoints to work with. Large screen designs often contain staggered grids, and the addition of LazyHorizontalStaggeredGrid and LazyVerticalStaggeredGrid will help implement these.



Feedback from the Android community always moves us forward. With your input we have updated our roadmap, focusing on areas that will help you implement Compose successfully. We’re now focusing on supporting more advanced use cases, covering more Material 3 components, improving platform support, tooling and performance.


New and updated guidance

No matter where you are in your learning journey, we’ve got you covered! We added and revamped a lot of the guidance on Compose:

Compose Camp

Running from September through December is a world-wide community-organized event series called Compose Camp! With both a beginner and an experienced track, developers of all levels can join Compose Camp to learn together with others. We already see lots of traction, with many videos being posted by GDGs and GDSCs all over the globe, and many events hosted on our Community platform.


Happy Composing!

We hope that you’re as excited by these developments as we are! If you haven't started yet, it's time to learn Jetpack Compose and see how your team and development process can benefit from it. Get ready for improved velocity and developer productivity. Happy Composing!