Tag Archives: form factors

Bringing New Input Support to Desktop AVD

Posted by Joshua Hale – Software Engineer

As large screens become increasingly important within the Android app ecosystem, we are committed to enhance tools to help Android developers adapt their apps for these large screen form factors. In doing so, we strive to ensure that we can bring impactful tools to enhance the overall experience for building for all large screens such as foldables, tablets, and Chromebooks.

Over the last year, the team has worked on bringing Android 13 to the Desktop AVD, along with some additional enhancements to input support within the emulator. The Android 13 release of the Desktop AVD is now available within Android Studio. To test using this emulator, create a new virtual device.

What is the Desktop AVD?

Android Studio comes bundled with various virtual devices that run on different API levels and architectures. These emulators help developers test Android apps across a variety of devices, allowing for testing across different screen sizes, form factors, and APIs.

When an Android app runs on a Chromebook, it uses functionality that mirrors desktop behaviors, such as minimizing, maximizing, or resizing to a user-specified size. The Desktop Android Virtual Device (AVD) is an emulator that allows testing in a freeform windowing mode, similar to a Chromebook, to support this functionality.

For a deeper dive into the Desktop AVD, check out Desktop AVD in Android Studio.

Screenshot of the Desktop AVD emulator, rendering a clock app, browser window, and downloads folder in freeform windowing mode

What enhancements come with the Android 13 desktop AVD?

Most laptops use a keyboard—and it’s a common input device for increased productivity with tablets and foldables. Prior to Android 13, the Desktop AVD relied solely on uncustomizable input mapping built into Android Studio, which can cause friction points for users who rely on physical devices for mapped input and shortcuts. The Android 13 release of the Desktop AVD adds support for common keyboard interactions with Android apps. You can now test shortcuts, support keys, and mouse support to help you adhere to the large screen app quality guidelines.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The majority of apps within Google Play are designed for mobile usage and as such do not always support keyboard interactions. In Android 13, the Desktop AVD adds support for commonly used shortcuts, such as Ctrl+C (Copy) and Ctrl+V (Paste). These shortcuts can be used when copying text from a TextView/Text composable or pasting text into an EditText/TextField. These shortcuts are intercepted by the system and automatically applied.

Custom shortcuts (which are not intercepted by the system) are also included in this release. An example of this type of shortcut: a media player app that uses the Spacebar to play or pause media. You must use the new Hardware Input feature within Android Studio Hedgehog to use custom shortcuts. This will allow Android Studio to pass custom shortcuts directly to the emulator. If this is not enabled, Android Studio may consume the key combination.

Support keys

Android 13 supports additional keymappings for support keys. These keys are mapped to controls that are similar to experiences for keyboard shortcuts on a desktop. Some examples of these support keys include:

    • Esc: Dismisses pop-ups and notifications.
    • Delete / Backspace: Deletes text within an EditText or TextField
    • Arrow Keys: Provides in-app navigation (Arrow Up/Down to scroll).

Mouse support

In addition to enhanced keyboard support, there are additional mouse controls integrated into the Desktop AVD. Using the scroll wheel sends a mouse scroll event to the app that has input focus. Right-clicking the mouse sends a right-click event—which can be used to show context menus if the app supports it.

Where can you start?

Large screen app quality provides guidance around creating high quality large screen apps across all form factors, outlining a comprehensive set of quality requirements for most types of Android apps. Not all requirements need to be met, but it’s best practice for you to adhere to the requirements that make sense for your apps.

Create a desktop emulator today in Android Studio Hedgehog to see how your Android app responds to keyboard and mouse inputs and freeform window resizing.

Prepare your app for the new Samsung tablets, foldables and watches

Posted by the Android team

From foldable innovations to seamless connectivity, Google and Samsung have continued to work together to create helpful experiences across Android phones, tablets, smartwatches and more. Today at Galaxy Unpacked in Seoul, Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy Z Flip5 and Z Fold5, Galaxy Watch6 series, and Galaxy Tab S9 series.

With these new devices from Samsung, there are four more reasons to ensure your app looks great across all your user’s favorite screens. Here are three ways you can ensure your app is ready for these great new Samsung devices:

1. Provide a great foldable experience

The launch of the new Galaxy Z Flip5 and Z Fold5 brings two brand new foldables to the Android ecosystem, so it is important to provide experiences that have fully adaptive UIs. The bottom line is that layout and app behavior should be based on device configuration and available features, and not the physical type of the device.

When it comes to providing a great foldable experience, here are a few of our top recommendations:

Illustration of Window Class sizes showing compact, medium, and expanded sizes across widths from 600dp through 840 dp

  • Use window size classes to guide layout decisions based on your current windowing state using opinionated breakpoints that are derived from common device types.
  • Observe folding features with Jetpack WindowManager, which provides the set of folding features that intersect your app's current window.
  • Make dynamic, runtime decisions based on whether a feature is available, instead of assuming that a feature is or is not available for a certain kind of device.
  • Referring in the UI to the user’s device as simply a “device” covers all form factors and is the simplest to implement. However, differentiating between the multiple devices a user may have provides a more polished experience and enables you to display the type of the device to the user using heuristics relevant to your particular use case.

You can learn more about how (and why) to implement the recommendations above in this detailed blog and, to find best practices for updating your app, check out the Support different screen sizes page.

2. Design with multi-device experiences in mind

With new devices, big and small, it is important to think through the user experience you hope to accomplish. A large part of that is the UI and design of your app – with specific consideration to account for based on screen sizes and types.

Ensuring your app looks great on large screens is a critical part of your users’ experience. Material You supports beautiful, efficient tablet and foldable experiences – and, at Google I/O this year, the team dove into the latest updates to large screen guidelines for designers and developers. You can also get inspired with the latest design guidance and mockup in check out the Large Screens Gallery.

To help with the challenges of designing and building great watch experiences that work for all, we created our the Wear OS Gallery This blog and the series of videos that accompany it are built to get you started designing inclusive smartwatch apps. For even more information on beautiful smartwatch design, discover the new Wear OS Gallery where you can find general design tips, verticalized use cases, and implementation ideas.

3. Get ready for Wear OS 4

The next generation of Wear OS is here! The Galaxy Watch6 series comes with the newest version of Google’s smartwatch platform, Wear OS 4. This platform update is also coming soon to other Samsung Galaxy watches, including the Watch4 and Watch5.

Wear OS 4 is based on Android 13, which is several versions newer than the current Wear OS version, so your app will need to handle the system behavior changes that took effect in Android 12 and Android 13. We recommend you start by testing your app and releasing a compatible update first – as devices get upgraded to Wear OS 4, it’s a basic but a critical level of quality that provides a good app experience for users.

Download the Wear OS 4 emulator in Android Studio Hedgehog to explore new features and test your app on Wear OS 4 Developer Preview.

The release of Wear OS 4 comes with many exciting changes – including a new way to build watchfaces.

The new Watch Face Format is a declarative XML format that allows you to configure the appearance and behavior of watch faces. This means that there's no executable code involved in creating a watch face, and there's no code embedded in your watch face APK. The Wear OS platform takes care of the logic needed to render the watch face so you can focus on your creative ideas, rather than code optimizations or battery performance.

Get started with watch faces using our documentation or create your own watch face with Samsung’s Watch Face Studio design tool.

Get started building a multi-device experience today!

With all the amazing additions to the Android ecosystem coming from Galaxy Unpacked, there has never been a better time to be sure your app looks great on all the devices your users know and love - from tablets to foldables to watches.

Learn more about building multi-device experiences from Deezer, where they increased their monthly active users 4X after improving multi-device support. Then get started with Jetpack WindowManager to help you build a responsive app for large screens by checking out the documentation and sample app. Finally, get to know Wear OS 4 and try it out with your app!

Deezer increased its monthly active users 4X after improving multi-device support

Posted by the Android team

Deezer is a global music streaming platform that provides users access to over 110 million tracks. Deezer aims to make its application easily accessible, letting users listen to their audio when, where, and how they want. With the growing popularity of Wear OS devices and large screens and foldables, the Deezer team saw an opportunity to give its users more ways to stream by enhancing its multi-device support.

We’re focused on delivering a consistently great UX on as many devices as possible.” — Hugo Vignaux, senior product manager at Deezer

Increasing smart watch support

Over the past few years, users increasingly requested Deezer to make its app available on Wear OS. During this time, the Deezer team had also seen rapid growth in the wearable market.

“The Wear OS market was growing thanks to the Fitbit acquisition by Google, the Pixel watch announcement, and the switch to Wear OS on Galaxy watches,” said Hugo Vignaux, a senior product manager at Deezer. “It was perfect timing because Google raised the opportunity with us to invest in Wear OS by joining the Media Experience Program in 2022.”

Deezer’s developers initially focused on providing instant, easy access to users’ personalized playlists from the application. To do this, engineers streamlined the app’s Wear OS UI, making it easier for users to control the app from their wrist. They also implemented a feature that allowed users to download their favorite Deezer playlists straight to their smartwatches, making offline playback possible without requiring a phone or an internet connection.

The Deezer team relied on Google’s Horologist and its Media Toolkit during development. Horologist and its libraries guided the team and ensured updates to the UI adhered to Wear best practices. It also made rolling out features like audio and bluetooth management much easier.

“The player view offered by the Media Toolkit was a source of inspiration and guaranteed that the app’s code quality was up to par,” said Hugo. “It also allowed us to focus on unit testing and resiliency rather than developing new features from scratch.”

More support for large screens and foldables

Before updating the app, Deezer’s UX wasn’t fully optimized for large screens and foldables. With this latest update, Deezer developers created special layouts for multitasking on large screens, like tablets and laptops, and used resizable emulators to optimize the app’s resizing capabilities for each screen on foldables.

“Supporting large screens means we can better fit multiple windows on a screen,” said Geoffrey Métais, engineering manager at Deezer. “This allows users to easily switch between apps, which is good because Deezer doesn’t require a user's full attention for them to make use of its UI.”

On tablets, Deezer developers split pages that were displayed vertically to be displayed horizontally. Developers also implemented a navigation rail and turned some lists into grids. These simple quality-of-life updates improved UX by giving users an easier way to click through the app.

Making these changes was easy for developers thanks to the Jetpack WindowManager library. “The WindowManager library made it simple to adapt our UI to different screen sizes,” said Geoffrey. “It leverages Jetpack Compose’s modularity to adapt to any screen size. And Compose code stays simple and consistent despite addressing a variety of different configurations.”

Updates to large screens and foldables and Wear OS were all created using Jetpack Compose and Compose for Wear OS, respectively. With Jetpack Compose, Deezer developers were able to efficiently create and implement a design system that focused on technical issues within the new app. The Deezer team attributes their increased productivity with Compose to Composable functions, which lets developers reuse code segments, and Android Studio, which helps developers iterate on features faster.

“The combination of a proper Design System with Jetpack Compose’s modularity and reactive paradigms is a very smart and efficient solution to improve usability without losing development productivity,” said Geoffrey.

'With the new capabilities of Wear OS 3, we’ve optimized the Deezer experience for the next generation of smartwatches, letting our users listen to their music anywhere, anytime.' — Hugo Vignaux, senior product manager at Deezer

The impact of increased multi-device support

Increasing multi-device support was easy for Deezer developers thanks to the tools and resources offered by Google. The updates the Deezer team made across screens improved the app’s UI, making it easier for users to navigate the app and listen to audio on their own terms.

Since updating for Wear OS and other Android devices, the Deezer team saw a 4X increase in user engagement and received positive feedback from its community.

“Developing for WearOS and across devices was great thanks to the help of the Google team and the availability of libraries and APIs that helped us deliver some great features, such as Horologist and its Media Toolkit. All those technical assets were very well documented and the Google team’s dedication was tremendous,” said Hugo.

Get started

Learn how you can start developing for Wear OS and other Android devices today.

Get ready for I/O ‘23: start planning your sessions, and take a look at some of Android’s favorite moments!

Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations

Google I/O 2023 is just a week away, kicking off on Wednesday May 10 at 10AM PT with the Google Keynote and followed at 12:15PM PT by the Developer Keynote. The program schedule launched last week, allowing you to save sessions to your calendar and start previewing content.

To help you get ready for this year's Google I/O, we’re taking a look back at some of Android’s favorite moments from past Google I/Os, as well as a playlist of developer content to help you prepare. Take a look below, and start getting ready!


Modern Android Development

Helping you stay more productive and create better apps, Modern Android Development is Android’s set of tools and APIs, and they were born across many Google I/Os. Tor Norbye, Director of Engineering for Android, reflects on how Android development tools, APIs, and best practices have evolved over the years, starting in 2013 when he and the team announced Android Studio. Here are some of the talks we’re excited for in developer productivity at this year’s Google I/O:



Building for a multi-device world

From the launch of Android Auto and Android Wear in 2014 to last year’s preview of the Google Pixel Tablet, Google I/O has always been an important moment for seeing the new form factors that Android is extending to. Sara Hamilton, Developer Relations Engineer for Android, discusses how we are continuing to invest in multi-device experiences and making it easier for you to build for the entire Android device ecosystem. Sara shares her excitement for developers continuing to bring unique experiences to all screen sizes and types, from tablets and foldables, to watches and tvs. Some of our favorite talks at this year’s Google I/O in the multi-device world include:




The platform and app quality

From originally playing a smaller part in Google I/O keynotes in the early days to announcing 3 billion monthly active users in 2021, Dan Sandler, Software Engineer for Android, looks back at the tremendous growth of the Android platform and how it’s continuing to evolve. With a focus on helping you make quality apps, here are some of our favorite Android platform talks this year:




We can’t wait to show you all that’s new across Android in just under a week. Be sure to tune in on the Google I/O website on May 10 to catch the latest Android updates and announcements this year!

Get ready for I/O ‘23: start planning your sessions, and take a look at some of Android’s favorite moments!

Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations

Google I/O 2023 is just a week away, kicking off on Wednesday May 10 at 10AM PT with the Google Keynote and followed at 12:15PM PT by the Developer Keynote. The program schedule launched last week, allowing you to save sessions to your calendar and start previewing content.

To help you get ready for this year's Google I/O, we’re taking a look back at some of Android’s favorite moments from past Google I/Os, as well as a playlist of developer content to help you prepare. Take a look below, and start getting ready!


Modern Android Development

Helping you stay more productive and create better apps, Modern Android Development is Android’s set of tools and APIs, and they were born across many Google I/Os. Tor Norbye, Director of Engineering for Android, reflects on how Android development tools, APIs, and best practices have evolved over the years, starting in 2013 when he and the team announced Android Studio. Here are some of the talks we’re excited for in developer productivity at this year’s Google I/O:



Building for a multi-device world

From the launch of Android Auto and Android Wear in 2014 to last year’s preview of the Google Pixel Tablet, Google I/O has always been an important moment for seeing the new form factors that Android is extending to. Sara Hamilton, Developer Relations Engineer for Android, discusses how we are continuing to invest in multi-device experiences and making it easier for you to build for the entire Android device ecosystem. Sara shares her excitement for developers continuing to bring unique experiences to all screen sizes and types, from tablets and foldables, to watches and tvs. Some of our favorite talks at this year’s Google I/O in the multi-device world include:




The platform and app quality

From originally playing a smaller part in Google I/O keynotes in the early days to announcing 3 billion monthly active users in 2021, Dan Sandler, Software Engineer for Android, looks back at the tremendous growth of the Android platform and how it’s continuing to evolve. With a focus on helping you make quality apps, here are some of our favorite Android platform talks this year:




We can’t wait to show you all that’s new across Android in just under a week. Be sure to tune in on the Google I/O website on May 10 to catch the latest Android updates and announcements this year!

U-NEXT sees 1.5X increase in tablet installations after boosting support for large screens

Posted by the Android team

As the largest domestic streaming and digital content service in Japan, U-NEXT is always looking for new ways to connect its users to their favorite content. With just a single application, the platform hosts an extensive library of over 840,000 titles, ranging from movies, anime, and live streams to manga, magazines, and e-books.

Always looking for ways to improve its UX for its expanding user base, U-NEXT recently turned to the growing market of large screens and foldables, which includes devices like tablets and Chromebooks. Here, U-NEXT engineers saw an opportunity to create a better way to view content by focusing on what makes these devices special. For example, better multi-window support on larger screens could offer a more visually rich UX, while an improved foldable UX might better mimic the experience readers get with a traditional paperback.

But some users bumped into bugs while using the U-NEXT app with these larger and foldable viewing formats. For instance, the app would often hide important buttons when users opened U-NEXT on larger screens, forcing them to search the page for those navigation tools.

To optimize a UX overhaul to support these formats, the U-NEXT team tackled the project in two phases: remove any existing bugs, then add the features that its large-screen users would benefit from the most.

Headshot of Tomoya Miwa, Principal engineer at U-NEXT, smiling, with text quote 'We wanted to provide a better user experience using the advantages of large screens and foldables'

Clearing out the bugs

To fix the visibility issue for important in-app navigation buttons, U-NEXT engineers used a ConstraintLayout to set constraint barriers. These barriers prevented UI elements from being pushed off-screen while ensuring they’re always oriented correctly, no matter the screen size.

What’s more, U-NEXT’s application didn’t always display properly on larger screens. For example, pages displaying browsable video lists typically consist of a header and a curated list of content. These lists are supposed to occupy most of the space on the page. But on larger screens, the headers occupied the most on-screen real estate, making video content harder to navigate. The U-NEXT team resolved this issue by restricting the width of the header image on larger screens, giving the list more space and making browsing easier for large-screen users.

When users view books on the U-NEXT application, they can tap the screen to reveal a horizontal, scrollable wheel that lets them quickly and easily navigate their place in the text. But when users tried to access this navigation tool on Chromebooks, it wouldn’t appear on the page.

“Originally, we used SystemUiVisibility to determine whether a Chromebook was full-screen when a user tapped it,” said Tomoya Miwa, principal engineer at U-NEXT. “If SystemUiVisibility detected it wasn’t full screen, it’s supposed to display the controller. However, this listener isn’t called on when SystemUiVisibility is changed on Chromebooks, so the controller couldn’t be displayed.”

This meant U-NEXT had to change how they manage the visibility of the controller when SystemUiVisibility changes on Chromebooks. After this bug fix, the application would hide and display the controller at the same time when the screen is tapped on a Chromebook, resolving the issue for these users.

The last bug U-NEXT devs tackled was one that temporarily disrupted video when users folded their device during viewing. Switching device orientation while viewing content is supposed to be seamless, but the automatic deletion and recreation of the Activity during orientation changes caused videos to momentarily cut out.

Instead of letting Android handle these configuration changes automatically, U-NEXT developers changed the app to handle them manually. Using onConfigurationChanged(), the team overrode the change and prevented the UI elements from automatically being deleted and recreated, letting the app preserve them and prevent any viewing interruptions.

Making the most with more form factors

As part of its feature overhaul, U-NEXT replaced the traditional navigation bar with a navigation rail, which U-NEXT engineers anticipated would significantly improve the user experience. U-NEXT made this change in line with Android’s Do’s and Don't for Large Screens presentation from its recent Android Developer Summit, which provided best practices for developers optimizing for large screens.

“Reachability is an important factor when it comes to curating comfortable user experiences,” said Tomoya. “With a traditional, horizontal navigation bar, it makes it difficult to reach the buttons in the middle. With a navigation rail, it becomes much easier to reach these buttons.”

Image showing side by side rendering of UI before the implementation of the navigation rail on the left and after on the right

Next, the team enhanced support for two-page spreads when users viewed any e-books content on large screens. Apps typically display a single page when devices are oriented vertically on large screens and foldables. But because most large screens and foldables offer plenty of room for a double-page view, U-NEXT developers wanted to ensure users would always see a double-page spread whether in portrait or landscape orientation—even when the device was slightly folded.

The U-NEXT team also included some smaller, quality-of-life updates to make the user experience for large screens and foldables even better. These included enhancing the app’s compatibility with Compose by ensuring the Navigation component was consistent on every screen size, adding better support for Google Play in-app billing on large screens, and optimizing picture-in-picture viewing.

'The number of installations on tablets increased by more than 1.5x following the update for large screen devices.' — Tomoya Miwa, principal engineer at U-NEXT

Android support makes optimization easy

The U-NEXT team was surprised by how easy it was to optimize its app for large screens and foldable devices. Thanks to Android’s developer resources, U-NEXT was able to improve content viewing on its app, across devices, while also minimizing time and effort.

“It’s not that difficult,” said Tomoya. “Introducing the navigation was relatively easy, and foldable support in general is not hard as long as your app is compatible with basic screen rotation.”

Since updating the U-NEXT app to better support large screens, tablet installations have increased by 1.5X. Additionally, the watch time from users on large screen devices jumped by more than 10%.

Looking forward, the U-NEXT team plans to keep expanding its app’s large screen capabilities by enhancing mouse and keyboard compatibility, introducing list detail view to improve search functionality, adding greater support for tabletop mode, and implementing drag-and-drop features to make content sharing easier.

U-NEXT is excited to see Android add more resources to its large and expanding list of documentation, including the recently updated Material 3 library, which will further help support the growing number of users with large screen and foldable devices.

Start optimizing for large screens today

More people are using large screens, foldables, and other up-and-coming form factors. Learn how you can better support your users on these devices with examples from Android’s Large Screen Gallery.

Kakaonavi increased foldable adoption by 24.5% after optimizing its app for large screens

Posted by the Android team

Kakaonavi prides itself on providing fast, accurate routes while offering several other helpful features, including directions to the nearest EV charging stations, car wash order services, navigation data, maintenance reminders, and more. As Korea’s top ranking driving assistant, Kakaonavi wants to make the daily driving experience as easy as possible for its users. Recently, that meant making its services consistent across devices.

With an increasing number of people using large screen and foldable Android devices, Kakaonavi saw a need to evolve its application to optimize the driving experience across all screen shapes and sizes. To do this, the Kakaonavi team focused on establishing a high-quality user experience for large screens by using Android’s latest software features.

Meeting the growing demand for large screens and foldables

Before updating its app, Kakaonavi’s user experience wasn’t tailored for large screens and foldables. The different sizes of devices caused the UI to be displayed improperly on them, which affected the user experience because screen ratio and resolution have a significant impact on usability.

Kakaonavi also recognized that many of its users preferred foldables because they’re easier to position in vehicles, allowing drivers to prop their device on a dashboard or center console. “The reason we decided to focus on foldables is due to the flexible display options provided by them,” said Jaesun Lee, Android developer at Kakaonavi. “Drivers can view the map however they prefer depending on how they fold or unfold the device inside their vehicle.”
ALT TEXTAdditionally, some drivers, including professionals like truck drivers and taxi drivers, use Kakaonavi with three to four other apps simultaneously through Android OS’s split-screen mode. At the time, the Kakaonavi team had only established this type of multi-window supportfor devices with standard resolutions, leading to some of its users experiencing UI issues when trying to run multiple applications at once.

Cohesive experiences across form factors

Developers at Kakaonavi addressed these issues by creating a common UI for large screen and foldable devices. They needed to ensure the UI was consistent whether the device was folded or unfolded, or in portrait or landscape mode. The UI also had to work efficiently while users ran multiple apps on their device’s main display. Because the ability to display map and location information on a larger screen is one of the benefits of these devices, creating consistency across layouts was essential to Kakaonavi’s success.

Using ConstraintLayout, which lets developers create large, complex layouts with a flatter app structure, the Kakaonavi team displayed a uniform, responsive UI regardless of the screen size or ratio. To handle configuration changes that are common on these devices, such as resizing windows or orientation changes, Kakaonavi's developers overrode onConfigurationChanged().

Overriding onConfigurationChanged() ensured the app ran smoothly on all screen sizes and during view mode changes by preventing the system from recreating UI elements triggered by folding and unfolding a device or opening multiple windows. Manually configuring these changes to preserve UI elements, rather than automatically deleting and recreating them, drastically improved the app’s UI performance for these new form factors.

“Since the map and UI state are updated frequently by GPS, we decided that the app would perform better by responding only to changes in screen orientation and screen size with onConfigurationChanged(), rather than restoring the previous state by restarting the Activity,” said Jaesun.

The Kakaonavi team also used multi-resume to enhance the app’s multi-window support for large screens and foldables. Multi-resume lets its users keep multiple applications in an active state while on screen, making multitasking more convenient and reliable.

ALT TEXT

Positive results and expanding opportunities

The number of people using large screen and foldable devices has grown significantly and will continue to grow as more of these devices become available. Currently, there are more than 270 million large screen Android devices in use, including tablets, foldables, and Chrome OS devices.

Kakaonavi has seen this same trend in devices used by its consumers. Since the brand began optimizing its application for large screens in January 2022, its number of monthly active users who use the app on foldables has increased by 24.5%, and the company has received positive feedback from drivers using tablets and foldables as their main source of navigation. As of today, Kakaonavi is optimized for all available tablets and foldables.

The Kakaonavi team is excited by the opportunities these new form factors will bring by giving its users more ways to interact with the app. Looking ahead, the brand plans to further optimize its UI with Jetpack Compose and is already considering how to further tailor its multi-window support to large screens and foldables.

“There will be more devices with various screen sizes and ratios in the future,” said Jaesun. “That’s why we believe it’s important to always provide an optimized UI and meet the needs of consumers’ frequently changing screens.”

Optimize your app for all form factors

Learn how you can optimize your application for large screens and upcoming form factors.

Form Factors at Android Developer Summit ‘22

Posted by Alex Vanyo, Developer Relations EngineerThe Android Developer Summit is live with the second stop on our world tour - and we are thrilled to give you the latest updates on Android form factors! Discover the latest tools, APIs and guidance that make it easier to build apps that look great on large screens, wearables, and TVs. Here are the three things you need to know about form factors at ADS, and check out the full YouTube playlist here:

#1: Android developers are finding BIG success when optimizing their apps for large screens

The large screen category is growing, with over 270 million active large screen Android devices and an expanding portfolio of tablets, desktops, and foldables to choose from. That’s why there has never been a better time to be sure your app looks great across all screen sizes and postures. To learn practical tips for optimizing your app for large screens, check out the Do’s and Don’ts: Mindset for optimizing apps for larger screens session. Throughout the session, the Android team highlights design guidance, app quality, and additional tips for large screens on everything from reachability to canonical layouts. New Android Studio tools like emulators and reference devices make it easier to build and test.In-depth guides help you improve your app by optimizing layouts, avoiding camera issues, and enhancing support for peripherals like mouse, keyboard and stylus.

Large screens enable users to see more, do more, and experience more. With large screen sizes, there are ever-expanding opportunities to excite and delight your users with differentiated app experiences. That’s why we launched our new large screens gallery page during the Android Dev Summit kickoff, with general design tips and verticalized use cases, and implementation ideas.

#2: It’s easier than ever to develop for Wear OS

Compose for Wear OS is stable, bringing the modern UI toolkit to the wrist and making it simpler than ever to build exceptional Wear OS apps. This toolkit is designed to help you get your app up and running faster than before; Outdooractive adopted Compose for Wear OS and enhanced their wearable experience with 30% fewer development hours. Equally important as development time is the user experience you are able to provide. Todoist rebuilt their app using Compose for Wear OS, saw their growth rate on Google Play increase by 50%, and heard positive feedback internally and on their social media channels. To begin developing with Compose for Wear OS, get started on our curated learning pathway for a step-by-step learning journey. Where you can find documentation including a quick start guide and get hands on experience with the Compose for Wear OS codelab!

Outdooractive cut development time by an estimated 30% with Compose for Wear OS
The Android Developer Summit technical sessions dive deep into the content you need to build Wear OS apps, with guidance on app architecture, testing, handling rotary input and verticalized sessions for media and fitness. We have seen the impact that Health Services has had on developing health and fitness apps for the wrist, and how powerful this can be when extended with Health Connect on mobile. Using Google APIs and tools, Strava improved their user engagement and retention - with 30% more active days from Wear OS users on Strava than users without a wearable device. For more information on how to start building apps for Wear OS check out the developer site.

#3: Find tips and tricks for developing a great Android TV app

Finally, for Android TV we have collected tips for building amazing living room user experiences, including some new platform features in Android 12 and 13. TV is an important part of the Android ecosystem; ⅓ of US households watch 25+ hours of content each week. Plus, there are now over 110 million monthly active AndroidTV OS devices. There is a ton to learn about how you can tap into this audience in our Improving the TV User Experience technical session including an update on Compose, seeing how App Bundles relate to TV, and guidance and best practices around energy savings and user preferences.

Those were the top three announcements about Form Factors at Android Developer Summit. Want to learn more? Check out the full form factors playlist on YouTube!

What’s next for Android Dev Summit’ 22? The Platform track, on November 14

This was the second stop on the Android Dev Summit ‘22 tour. Last month, we kicked things off with the keynote as well as our first track on Modern Android Development. After today’s second track on Form Factors, there’s more to come in our third and final track on the Platform, which will be broadcast live on YouTube next week on November 14. We can’t wait to see you again next week!

Coming up next for Android Dev Summit ‘22: The Form Factors track, on November 9!

Posted by Diana Wong, Product ManagerLast month, we kicked off the first part of Android Dev Summit, and later this week comes the second session track: Form Factors! In this track, we’ll bring you through all things Android form factors, including the API, tooling, and design guidance needed to help make your app look great on Android watches, tablets, TVs and more. We dropped information on the livestream agenda, technical talks, and speakers — so start planning your schedule!

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.

Here’s what to expect on November 9th:

Get ready for all things form factors! We’re kicking the livestream off at 1:00 PM GMT on November 9th on YouTube and developer.android.com, where you’ll be able to watch over 20 sessions and check out the latest announcements on building for different form factors, with talks such as:

  • Build Better UIs Across Form Factors with Android Studio
  • Deep Dive into Wear OS App Architecture
  • Do's and Don'ts: Mindset for Optimizing Apps for Large Screens

And to wrap the livestream up, at 4:20 PM GMT, we’ll be hosting a live Q&A – #AskAndroid - so you can get your burning form factors questions answered live by the team who built Android. Post your questions to Twitter or comment in the YouTube livestream using #AskAndroid, for a chance to have your questions answered on the livestream.


There’s more to come!

There is even more to get excited for as the Android Dev Summit continues later this month with the Platform track. On November 14, we’re broadcasting our Platform technical talks where you’ll learn about the latest innovations and updates to the Android platform. You’ll be able to watch talks such as Android 13: Migrate your apps, Presenting a high-quality media experience for all users, and Migrating to Billing Library 5 and more flexible subscriptions on Google Play. Get a sneak peak at all the Platform talks here.

Missed the kick off event? Watch the keynote on YouTube and check out the keynote recap so you don’t miss a beat! Plus, get up to speed on all things Modern Android Development with a recap video, blog, and the full MAD playlist where you can find case studies and technical sessions.

We’re so excited for all the great content yet to come from Android Dev Summit, and we’re looking forward to connecting with you!

3 things to know about Form Factors at Google I/O’22

Three different form factors- a phone, watch, and tablet 

With close to half a billion cars, TVs, watches and laptops running on Android, it is more important than ever for apps to work seamlessly across every device. This year at I/O, we renewed our focus on form factors and announced major updates for Wear OS and Large Screens. To help you get to the bottom of what’s new, here are the three things you need to know about Form Factors at Google I/O:


#1: Building Wear OS and fitness apps is simpler than ever

Compose for Wear OS GIF 

At I/O we announced the Beta release of Compose for Wear OS, our modern declarative UI toolkit designed to help developers build exceptional user experiences for Wear OS. Compose for Wear OS shares the foundation and principles of Jetpack Compose, helping to simplify and accelerate UI development. Additionally, Compose for Wear OS offers the Material catalog with components that are optimized for the watch experience.

We’ve been developing Compose for Wear OS with open source community feedback and participation. Since the Developer Preview, we’ve added and improved a number of components such as navigation, scaling lazy lists, input and gesture support and many more. Compose for Wear OS is now feature complete for the 1.0 release coming soon and the API is stable - so you can begin building beautiful, production-ready apps.

Health Services Logo

Health Services—the power efficient and easy-to-use library for collecting real-time sensor data on smartwatches—will soon be available in beta and ready for production use. Health Services enables apps to take advantage of modern smartwatch architecture, thus helping conserve battery while still delivering high frequency data. Since the alpha release last year, we have been working hard to increase performance and improve the developer experience. We have also made some improvements to the API in response to your feedback.

If you have an existing health and fitness app for Wear OS you want to update, or have a completely new app in mind, we suggest you look at Health Service to provide the best experience for Wear 3 users and prepare your app for additional devices and sensors in the future. For example, this library will power all the Google- and Fitbit-branded health and fitness experiences on the recently announced Google Pixel Watch.

Health Conect Logo

And, last but not least, we just launched Health Connect. With Health Connect, users will be able to securely store health and fitness data on their phone and connect and share that data with some of their favorite health and fitness apps. Samsung Health, Google Fit and Fitbit are integrating with Health Connect, along with many popular health and fitness apps. Health Connect is a common set of APIs for storing & sharing health data on Android phones. Developers can read from & write data to an on-device data store and we’ve standardized the schema and API behavior, making it easy for you to use the data. We know how important the privacy of each user’s health data is, so we centralized permissions and privacy controls - making it clear and simple for your users to manage and control this data.


#2: Google is all-in on tablets

Google is going big on large screens with innovations in hardware, optimizations in the operating system and a major investment in our app ecosystem. In the first quarter of this year, we saw active large screen users approaching 270 million, making it a great time to optimize for tablets, foldables and Chrome OS.

Since last I/O we launched Android 12L, a feature drop that makes Android 12 even better on large screens. With Android 13, we are including all of these improvements and more. Android 12L and 13 have a huge number of optimizations for large screens, including the task bar, multi-tasking, keyboard and mouse support, and a compatibility mode for applications. We also have exciting updates to guidance, testing and tools. To take the guesswork out of optimizing and testing your app for large screens, we created a set of Large Screen Quality guidelines and a number of Material Design Canonical Layouts. Our guidance is implemented in our Jetpack libraries, which bake in many of the most common tasks for Large Screen development, such as drag and drop.


Quote from Developer at Meta 

Hardware innovation is a cornerstone of Google’s investment in large screens - this year and beyond. At I/O, we announced the Google Pixel tablet, coming in 2023. Plus, our partners are creating some amazing devices with tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables coming from companies like Samsung, Lenovo, and OPPO.

With the incredible hardware and operating system innovations, more apps than ever are optimizing for large screens. Apps like Facebook, TikTok, HBO Max and Zoom look great on large screens. Here at Google, we recognize the opportunity with large screens. Apps like YouTube, Google Maps, Google Photos, Chrome, and many of our most popular apps are rolling out large screen optimizations, with more to come.

These apps - and more - are available on the Play Store, where we have made some of our most impactful updates to date. We are committed to helping users find the best large-screen optimized apps in the Play Store with new large screens focused editorial content and separate reviews and ratings for large-screen applications. Plus, we are updating Google Play to look awesome on a tablet, Chromebook or foldable device.


#3: We’re here to support you!

To make your apps even better on large screens and Wear OS, we’ve created in-depth content for making your app work better across different types of inputs, screen sizes and devices.

In Android Studio Dolphin Beta and Electric Eel Canary we’ve added new features for Wear OS and Large screens to help you be more productive when developing and testing for different form factors. Read more


Looking to get started? Here’s all the amazing I/O content to help you on your way: