Tag Archives: Android 11

Messenger and Conversations

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This blogpost is a collaboration between Google and Messenger from Facebook. Authored by Aaron Labiaga with support from Caleb Gomer and Samuel Guirado from Messenger.


Messenger is ubiquitous in the messaging app world and has pioneered the floating chat bubble. Bubbles help users keep conversations in view and accessible while multitasking, overlaying other UI elements in the foreground, and providing users easy access and visibility to their ongoing chats. Bubbles is one way Android 11 is making the platform more people-centric and expressive, reimagining the way we have conversations on our phones. Messenger’s early pioneering of the floating chat bubble, and the strong reception by users, helped lead to its native implementation in the framework.

new conversations ui gif

Bubbles

The Bubbles API is built on top of the notifications API and is exclusively focused on people in Android 11. First Introduced in Android 10, what was previously an opt-in feature is now on by default. To use bubbles, the developer must create BubbleMetadata, which is set on the notification. This metadata describes the Activity to launch when a bubble is clicked, along with various behaviors relevant to the expanded bubble. The Activity must follow the criteria of being embeddable and resizable in order to use it in a bubble.

Notification bubbles are reserved for conversations with persons in context. These are MessagingStyle notifications with a set long-lived shortcut ID. Please see the following Bubbles code sample how.


A Q&A with the Messenger team

The Messenger team shares their experience with the migration and prospect of the impact of the changes.

How was the migration to bubbles, technical challenges, scope, and impact on codebase?

Prior to Bubbles, Messenger used the SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW for its implementation of Bubbles. It achieved our purpose, but hosting complex Android UI outside of Activities is challenging to implement and maintain. Using this natively supported API allowed us to build more traditional, Activity-based Android UI that works well in Bubbles and full screen. This new Bubbles-based chat experience is much simpler and more maintainable than our SAW-based one. We are excited that Android believes that it is a user experience that will help drive improvements in the conversation space.
Ensuring that bubble shortcuts were up-to-date with the latest state of the conversation thread was a technical challenge worth noting. Picture changed, conversation deleted or contact blocked are events that require the bubble shortcut to be updated or even deleted. The Shortcuts API allows for easily registering/unregistering shortcuts and for querying and updating existing ones, which made this whole process very straight forward.

What are your future prospects on the impact of Messenger messages in the conversation space?

The conversation section will give our messages the right visibility. Given that conversation section ranks high in the notification drawer, we definitely want to be present in that space.

A people-centric experience in Android 11

Bubbles are just one way that Android 11 puts people at the heart of the experience for Android; if you’re a messaging or chat app, you should consider using the Bubbles API to help your users as they multi-task. It’s great to see apps like Messenger navigate the openness of Android to create innovative new experiences, and we’re excited to make Bubbles a native experience in Android 11. For more information, please visit the Conversation API guidelines.

#Android11: The Beta Launch Show – Here’s how to join in and watch next week!

Posted by The #Android11 team

In just under a week, we’ll kick off #Android11: The Beta Launch Show, your opportunity to find out what’s new in Android from the people who build Android. Join us on June 3, 11AM ET (8AM PT, 4PM BST, 8:30PM IST) as we unveil new features packed inside the next release, Android 11, as well as updates to help developers get the most out of modern Android development. You’ll be able to watch the show live on YouTube (don’t forget to set a reminder) or Twitter, and can sign-up for updates here.

Get your #AskAndroid questions answered live

Got a burning question? We’ve got experts ready to answer your #AskAndroid questions, and we’ll be wrapping up the show with a live Q&A session. All you have to do is share your question on Twitter using #AskAndroid, and we’ll be selecting questions for Android engineering and product leads Dave Burke and Stephanie Cuthbertson to answer live on-the-air.

Check out the list of talks

Also on June 3, we’ll be sharing 12 talks on a range of topics from Jetpack to Android Studio and Google Play–talks that we had originally planned for Google I/O–to help you take advantage of the latest in Android development. We just posted the full list of talks on the event page.

Sketchnote with us

Sketchnote with us gif

We want to see your take on the show, so grab your best pens, markers, and paper, download the template, and get ready to show off your sketchnote skills during The Beta Launch Show. Don’t forget to share your work using the hashtag #Android11 for a chance to be featured.

We can’t wait to share with you the latest we’ve been working on with you in just over a week at #Android11: The Beta Launch Show!

Run ARM apps on the Android Emulator

Posted by Michael Hazard

As part of the Android 11 developer preview we’ve released Android 11 system images, which are capable of executing ARM binaries with significantly improved performance. Previously, developers who were dependent on ARM libraries and could not build an x86 variant of their app either had to use system images with full ARM emulation, which are much slower than x86 system images when run on x86-based computers, or resort to physical devices. The new Android 11 system images are capable of translating ARM instructions to x86 without impacting the entire system. This allows the execution of ARM binaries for testing without the performance overhead of full ARM emulation.

The new Android 11 (Google APIs) x86 system image supports ARM ABIs, while the older Android Oreo system image does not

The new Android 11 (Google APIs) x86 system image supports ARM ABIs, while the older Android Oreo system image does not

Details

The significance of this may require a bit of context, especially if you build apps exclusively with Kotlin or the Java programming language. Unlike Kotlin or the Java programming language, both of which execute on the Android Runtime (ART), any C++ in your Android app compiles directly into machine instructions. This means that it needs to be compiled differently based on the architecture of the target device. Mobile phones tend to have ARM processors; consequently, many C++ dependencies you might add to your app, like a camera barcode scanner library, are only compatible with ARM processors. This is a problem if you develop on a computer with an x86-based processor, as it would prevent you from running your app.

Previously, if you wanted to get around this limitation and execute an app built for ARM on your x86 machine, you would have had to use an emulator system image with full ARM emulation. Due to the overhead of translating an entire system’s worth of ARM instructions to x86, emulator system images with full ARM emulation tend to run much slower than x86-based system images when run on x86 host machines. Additionally, emulator system images with full ARM emulation cannot take advantage of the hardware acceleration and CPU virtualization technologies provided by x86 processors.

The new ARM-compatible Android 11 system images allow the entire system to run x86 natively and take advantage of virtualization technologies as usual. When an app’s process requires an ARM binary, the binary is translated to x86 within that process exclusively. This allows the rest of the process to continue executing in x86, including the Android Runtime (ART), and other performance-critical libraries like libGLES and libvulkan. In addition to this, the translator avoids expensive memory access instrumentation and the associated performance hit by avoiding the execution of low-level hardware-specific libraries. These new emulator system images can be used both locally and on your own continuous integration infrastructure. This is possible thanks to collaboration with ARM Limited.

Going Forward

If you have previously chosen physical devices over the emulator due to the lack of performant ARM support, try out the Android 11 system images, which are now available alongside the Android 11 Developer Preview. These system images can be downloaded in Android Studio via either the SDK Manager or the Android Virtual Device Manager.

Using the Android Virtual Device Manager to create an AVD that runs Android 11

Using the Android Virtual Device Manager to create an AVD that runs Android 11

Once you get your app running on the emulator, consider adapting it for Chrome OS. Chrome OS also supports the execution of Android apps built for ARM on x86 laptops. Building for Chrome OS provides access to a substantial ecosystem of larger screen devices, allowing your application to reach even more users globally.

This technology should enable more developers to test with the Android Emulator. That said, we still recommend that developers publish both x86 and ARM ABI variants of their apps to achieve the best physical device performance and reach as many users as possible. Going forward, we plan to roll this technology out across a wider variety of API levels and ensure that it supports testing all use cases that a physical device would. Given that this is a new technology, please let us know of any problems via our Issue Tracker.

Note that the ARM to x86 translation technology enables the execution of intellectual property owned by Arm Limited. It will only be available on Google APIs and Play Store system images, and can only be used for application development and debug purposes on x86 desktop, laptop, customer on-premises servers, and customer-procured cloud-based environments. The technology should not be used in the provision of commercial hosted services.

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Handling Nullability in Android 11 and Beyond

Posted by David Winer, Kotlin Product Manager

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Last May at Google I/O, we announced that Android was going Kotlin first, and now over 60% of the top 1000 Android apps use Kotlin. One feature we love about Kotlin is that nullability is baked into its type system — when declaring a reference, you say upfront whether it can hold null values. In this post, we’ll look at how the Android 11 SDK does more to expose nullability information in its APIs and show how you can prepare your Kotlin code for it.

How does nullability in Kotlin work?

When writing code in Kotlin, you can use the question mark operator to indicate nullability: 

KOTLIN

var x: Int = 1
x = null // compilation error

var y: Int? = 1
y = null // okay

This aspect of Kotlin makes your code safer — if you later call a method or try to access a property on a non-null variable like x, you know you’re not risking a null pointer exception. We hear over and over again that this feature of Kotlin gives developers more peace of mind and leads to higher quality apps for end users.

How does nullability work with the Java programming language?

Not all of your (or Android’s) APIs are written in Kotlin. Fortunately, the Kotlin compiler recognizes annotations on Java programming languages methods that indicate whether they produce nullable or non-nullable values. For example: 

JAVA

public @Nullable String getCurrentName() {
   return currentName;
}

The @Nullable annotation ensures that when using the result of getCurrentName in a Kotlin file, you can’t dereference it without a null check. If you try, Android Studio will notify you of an error, and the Kotlin compiler will throw an error in your build. The opposite is true of @NonNull — it tells the Kotlin compiler to treat the method result as a non-null type, forbidding you from assigning that result to null later in your program.

The Kotlin compiler also recognizes two similar annotations, @RecentlyNullable and @RecentlyNonNull, which are the exact same as @Nullable and @NonNull, only they generate warnings instead of errors1.

Nullability in Android 11

Last month, we released the Android 11 Developer Preview, which allows you to test out the new Android 11 SDK. We upgraded a number of annotations in the SDK from @RecentlyNullable and @RecentlyNonNull to @Nullable and @NonNull (warnings to errors) and continued to annotate the SDK with more @RecentlyNullable and @RecentlyNonNull annotations on methods that didn’t have nullability information before.

What’s next

If you are writing in Kotlin, when upgrading from the Android 10 to the Android 11 SDK, you may notice that there are some new compiler warnings and that previous warnings may have been upgraded to errors. This is intended and a feature of the Kotlin compiler — these warnings tell you that you may be writing code that crashes your app at runtime (a risk you would miss entirely if you weren’t writing in Kotlin). As you encounter these warnings and errors, you can handle them by adding null checks to your code.

As we continue to make headway annotating the Android SDK, we’ll follow this same pattern — @RecentlyNullable and @RecentlyNonNull for one numbered release (e.g., Android 10), and then upgrade to @Nullable and @NonNull in the next release (e.g., Android 11). This practice will give you at least a full release cycle to update your Kotlin code and ensure you’re writing high-quality, robust code.

1. Due to rules regarding handling of annotations in Kotlin, there is currently a small set of cases where the compiler will throw an error for @Nullable references but not for @RecentlyNullable references.

Java is a trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.