Tag Archives: Google Play SDK Index

Google I/O 2024: What’s new in Android Development Tools

Posted by Mayank Jain – Product Manager, Android Studio

At Google I/O 2024, we announced an exciting new set of features and tools aimed at making Android development faster and easier. We also shared updates to Android Studio that will help you leverage AI and make it easier for you to build high quality apps for Android across the Android ecosystem.

You can check out the What’s new in Android Developer Tools session at Google I/O 2024 to see some of the new features in action or better yet, try them out yourself by downloading Android Studio Koala 🐨 Feature Drop in the preview release channel. Here’s a look at our announcements:

Leverage Gemini in Android Studio

Since launching AI features in Android Studio last year, we continue to evolve our underlying models, integrate your feedback, and expand availability to more countries and territories so that you can leverage AI in your workflow and become a more productive Android app developer. Using the built-in AI privacy controls, you can opt in to using the latest AI feature improvements that are tailored for your Android app project.

Code suggestions with Gemini in Android Studio

You can now provide custom prompts for Gemini in Android Studio to generate code suggestions. After you enable Gemini from the View > Tool Windows > Gemini tool window, right-click in the code editor and select Gemini > Transform selected code from the context menu to see the prompt field. You can then prompt Gemini to generate a code suggestion that either adds new code or transforms selected code. You can ask Gemini to simplify complex code by rewriting it, perform very specific code transformations such as “make this code idiomatic,” or generate new functions you describe. Android Studio then shows you Gemini’s code suggestion as a code diff, so that you can review and accept only the suggestions you want.

Code suggestions with Gemini in Android Studio

Gemini for recommendations on crash reports

App Quality Insights in Android Studio seamlessly incorporates both Firebase Crashlytics and Android Vitals data into Android Studio so you can access the most important app stability related information, without having to switch tools.

You can now use Gemini in Android Studio to analyze your crash reports, generate insights which are shown in the Gemini tool window, provide a crash summary, and when possible recommend next steps, including sample code and links to relevant documentation.

You can generate all of this information directly from the App Quality Insights tool window in Android Studio after you enable Gemini from View > Tool Windows > Gemini.

Gemini for recommendations on crash reports

Integrate Gemini API into your app with a starter template

Start prototyping with Gemini models in your apps with our new starter app template provided in Android Studio. In this app template, you can issue prompts directly to the Gemini API, add image sources as input, and display the responses on the screen. Additionally, use Google AI Studio to craft custom prompts for your app.

When you are ready to scale your AI features to production with Google Cloud infrastructure, you can also access the powerful capabilities of Gemini models through Vertex AI. This is Google’s fully-managed development platform designed for building and deploying generative AI. Whether you simply need world class inference capabilities, or want to build end-to-end AI workflows with Vertex, the Gemini API is a great solution.

Integrate Gemini API into your app with a starter template

Gemini 1.5 Pro coming to Android Studio

We previously announced that Gemini in Android Studio uses the Gemini 1.0 Pro model to help you by answering Android development questions, generating code, finding resources, or explaining best practices. In this preview stage of Gemini in Android Studio, we are offering Gemini 1.0 Pro at no-cost for all users for now. Gemini 1.0 Pro is a versatile model, making it ideal to scale. However we acknowledge that its quality of responses may be limited in some cases. Based on your feedback, we are committed to improving the quality for Android development, and excited to add more features using Gemini to make your developer experience even more productive.

Along this journey, the Gemini 1.5 Pro model will be coming to Android Studio later this year. Equipped with a Large Context Window, this model notably leads to higher quality responses, and unlocks use cases like multimodal input that you might have seen in the Google I/O 2024 sessions. Stay tuned for more updates on how you can access more capable models in Android Studio.

Productivity enhancements

Release Monitoring with Firebase

Today we announced the general availability of the Firebase Release Monitoring Dashboard. The Firebase Release Monitoring Dashboard is a single dashboard powered by Firebase Crashlytics to monitor your most recent production releases of your Android app. It updates in real time to give you a high-level view of the most important release metrics, like crash-free sessions, comparisons, and benchmarking based on your previous releases.

Android Device Streaming

Android Device Streaming, powered by Firebase, lets you securely connect to remote physical Android devices hosted in Google's data centers. It is a convenient way to test your app against physical units of some of the latest Android devices, including the Google Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, Pixel Fold, and more.

Starting today, Android Device Streaming now includes the following devices, in addition to the portfolio of 20+ device models already available:

Samsung Galaxy Fold5
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra
Google Pixel 8a

Additionally, if you’re new to Firebase, Android Studio automatically creates and sets up a no-cost Firebase project for you when you sign in to Koala Feature Drop to use Device Streaming. So, you can get to streaming the device you need much faster. Learn more about Android Device Streaming quotas, including promotional quota for the Firebase Blaze plan projects available for a limited time.

Connect to the latest physical Android devices in moments with Android Device Streaming,
powered by Firebase

USB cable speed detection

Did you know that USB cable bandwidth varies from 480 Mbps (USB-2) to up to 40,000 Mbps (USB-4)? Android Studio Koala Feature Drop now makes it trivial to differentiate low performing USB cables from the high performing ones.

When you connect an Android device, Android Studio automatically detects the device and USB cable bandwidth and warns you if there’s a mismatch in USB bandwidth.

Note: USB cable speed detection requires an updated ADB found in Android SDK Platform Tools v34+, and is currently available for macOS and Linux.

USB cable speed detection.
Learn more about USB speeds here

A new way to sign in with Google in Android Studio

It’s now easier to sign in to multiple Google services with one authentication step. Whether you want to use Gemini in Android Studio, Firebase for Android Device Streaming, Google Play for Android Vitals reports, or all these useful services, the new sign in flow makes it easier to get up and running. If you’re new to Firebase and want to use Android Device Streaming, Android Studio automatically creates a project for you, so you can quickly start streaming a real physical Firebase device. With granular permissions scoping, you will always be in control of which services have access to your account. To get started, just click the profile avatar and sign in with your developer account.

A new way to sign in with Google in Android Studio

Device UI setting shortcut

Using the device UI setting shortcut, you can now effortlessly configure your devices to desired settings related to dark theme, font size, display size, app language, and more, all directly through the Running Devices window. You can now test and debug your UI seamlessly for any of the possible scenarios required by your use case.

Device UI settings shortcuts

Faster and improved Profiler with a task-centric approach

The internals of the Android Studio Profiler have been dramatically improved. Popular profiling tasks like capturing a system trace with profileable apps now start up to 60% faster.*

We’ve redesigned the profiler to make it easier to start the task you’re interested in, whether it’s profiling your app’s CPU, memory, or power usage. For example, initiating a system trace task to profile and improve your app’s startup time is integrated right in the UI as you open the profiler.

Faster and improved Profiler with a task-centric approach
*Based on internal data, as tested in April 2024

Google Play SDK Index integration

Android Studio is integrated with the Google Play SDK Index to inform when there are known policy or version issues with SDKs used by your app. This enables you to update those dependencies and avoid issues that could prevent you from publishing new versions of your app.

In the Android Studio Koala Feature Drop release, the integration has been expanded to also include warnings from the Google Play SDK Console. This gives you a complete view of any potential version or policy issues in your dependencies before submitting your app to the Google Play Console.

Notes from SDK authors are now also displayed directly in Android Studio to save you time.

A warning from the SDK Index with the corresponding SDK author note

Preview tiles for Wear OS apps

Android Studio now has preview support for Tiles. You can now iterate much quicker when creating tiles, enabling you to quickly see what a Tile looks like on different configurations without needing to run it on a device.

Tiles previews usage for Wear OS apps

Generate synthetic sensor data for testing on Wear OS apps

To help simulate real life scenarios you can now generate synthetic (fake) data for a Wear OS emulator for health related sensors such as heart rate, speed, steps, and more. You are now able to set up and perform testing for a multi-sport training session in minutes, end-to-end in Android Studio, without ever leaving your desk.

Generate synthetic sensor data for testing on Wear OS apps

Compose Glance widget previews

Android Studio Koala Feature Drop makes it easy to preview your Jetpack Compose Glance widgets (1.1.0-rc01) directly within the IDE. Catch potential UI issues and fine-tune your widget's appearance early in the development process. Learn more about how to get started.

Previews for Compose Glance widgets

Live Edit for Compose enabled by default

Live Edit for Compose can accelerate your Compose development experience by automatically deploying code changes to the running application on an emulator or physical device. Live Edit can help you see the effect of updates to UX elements—for example new composables, modifier updates, and animations—on the overall app experience. As you become more familiar with Live Edit you will find many creative ways it can help improve your development experience and productivity.

In Android Studio Koala Feature Drop, Live Edit is enabled by default in manual mode and has increased stability and more robust change detection, including support for import statements.

Compose Preview Screenshot Testing with Now in Android app

Compose preview screenshot testing plugin (alpha)

Host-side screenshot testing is an easy and powerful way to test UIs and prevent regressions. Today, the first alpha version of the Compose Preview Screenshot Testing plugin is available as a separate plugin, to be used together with AGP 8.5.0-beta01 or higher. Add your Compose Previews to the src/main/screenshotTest folder and run the task to generate a diff report after UI updates. The generated HTML test report lets you visually detect any changes to your app’s UI.

This alpha version of the plugin is designed for rapid iteration and feedback. We plan to merge it back into AGP in the future, but for now, this separate plugin lets us experiment and improve the feature quickly. Learn more about how to get started.

IntelliJ Platform Update (2024.1)

Android Studio Koala Feature Drop includes the IntelliJ 2024.1 platform release, which comes with some very useful IDE improvements:

An overhauled terminal featuring both visual and functional enhancements to streamline command-line tasks. Learn more in this blog post.
A new feature called sticky lines in the editor simplifies working with large files and exploring new codebases. This feature keeps key structural elements, like the beginnings of classes or methods, pinned to the top of the editor as you scroll and provides an option to promptly navigate through the code by clicking on a pinned line.
Basic IDE functionalities like code highlighting and completion now work for Java and Kotlin during project indexing, which should enhance your startup experience.
You can now scale the IDE down to 90%, 80%, or 70%, giving you the flexibility to adjust the size of IDE elements both upward and downward.

Read the detailed IntelliJ release notes here.

To summarize

Android Studio Koala Feature Drop (2024.1.2) is now available in the Android Studio canary channel with

Gemini in Android Studio

Productivity enhancements

IntelliJ Platform Update (2024.1): also available in Koala 2024.1.1

And last, a quick reminder that going forward, the initial Android Studio releases will have the .1 Android Studio major version and introduce the updated IntelliJ platform version, while subsequent Feature Drops will increase the Android major version to .2 and focus on introducing Android-specific features that help you be more productive for Android app development.

How to get started

Ready to try the exciting new features in Android Studio?

You can download the canary version Android Studio Koala 🐨 Feature Drop (2024.1.2) today to incorporate these new features into your workflow or try the stable version Android Studio Jellyfish 🪼. You can also install them side by side by following these instructions.

As always, your feedback is important to us – check known issues, report bugs, suggest improvements, and be part of our vibrant community on LinkedIn Medium, YouTube, or X. Let's build the future of Android apps together!

Source: Android Developers Blog

13 Things to know for Android developers at Google I/O!

Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director of Android Developer Relations

Android I/O updates: Jetpack, Wear OS, etc

There aren’t many platforms where you can build something and instantly reach billions of people around the world, not only on their phones—but their TVs, cars, tablets, watches, and more. Today, at Google I/O, we covered a number of ways Android helps you make the most of this opportunity, and how Modern Android Development brings as much commonality as possible, to make it faster and easier for you to create experiences that tailor to all the different screens we use in our daily lives.

We’ve rounded up the top 13 things to know for Android developers—from Jetpack Compose to tablets to Wear OS and of course… Android 13! And stick around for Day 2 of Google I/O, when Android’s full track of 26 technical talks and 4 workshops drop. We’re also bringing back the Android fireside Q&A in another episode of #TheAndroidShow; tweet us your questions now using #AskAndroid, and we’ve assembled a team of experts to answer live on-air, May 12 at 12:30PM PT.

MODERN ANDROID DEVELOPMENT

#1: Jetpack Compose Beta 1.2, with support for more advanced use cases

Android’s modern UI toolkit, Jetpack Compose, continues to bring the APIs you need to support more advanced use cases like downloadable fonts, LazyGrids, window insets, nested scrolling interop and more tooling support with features like LiveEdit, Recomposition Debugging and Animation Preview. Check out the blog post for more details.

#2: Android Studio: introducing Live Edit

Get more done faster with Android Studio Dolphin Beta and Electric Eel Canary! Android Studio Dolphin includes new features and improvements for Jetpack Compose and Wear OS development and an updated Logcat experience. Android Studio Electric Eel comes with integrations with the new Google Play SDK Index and Firebase Crashlytics. It also offers a new resizable emulator to test your app on large screens and the new Live Edit feature to immediately deploy code changes made within composable functions. Watch the What’s new in Android Development Tools session and read the Android Studio I/O blog post here.

#3: Baseline Profiles - speed up your app load time!

The speed of your app right after installation can make a big difference on user retention. To improve that experience, we created Baseline Profiles. Baseline Profiles allow apps and libraries to provide the Android runtime with metadata about code path usage, which it uses to prioritize ahead-of-time compilation. We've seen up to 30% faster app startup times thanks to adding baseline profiles alone, no other code changes required! We’re already using baseline profiles within Jetpack: we’ve added baselines to popular libraries like Fragments and Compose – to help provide a better end-user experience. Watch the What’s new in app performance talk, and read the Jetpack blog post here.

BETTER TOGETHER

#4: Going big on Android tablets

Google is all in on tablets. Since last I/O we launched Android 12L, a release focused on large screen optimizations, and Android 13 includes all those improvements and more. We also announced the Pixel tablet, coming next year. With amazing new hardware, an updated operating system & Google apps, improved guidelines and libraries, and exciting changes to the Play store, there has never been a better time to review your apps and get them ready for large screens and Android 13. That’s why at this year’s I/O we have four talks and a workshop to take you from design to implementation for large screens.

#5: Wear OS: Compose + more!

With the latest updates to Wear OS, you can rethink what is possible when developing for wearables. Jetpack Compose for Wear OS is now in beta, so you can create beautiful Wear OS apps with fewer lines of code. Health Services is also now in beta, bringing a ton of innovation to the health and fitness developer community. And last, but certainly not least, we announced the launch of The Google Pixel Watch - coming this Fall - which brings together the best of Fitbit and Wear OS. You can learn more about all the most exciting updates for wearables by watching the Wear OS technical session and reading our Jetpack Compose for Wear OS announcement.

#6: Introducing Health Connect

Health Connect is a new platform built in close collaboration between Google and Samsung, that simplifies connectivity between apps making it easier to reach more users with less work, so you can securely access and share user health and fitness data across apps and devices. Today, we’re opening up access to Health Connect through Jetpack Health—read our announcement or watch the I/O session to find out more!

#7: Android for Cars & Android TV OS

Android for Cars and Android TV OS continue to grow in the US and abroad. As more users drive connected or tune-in, we’re introducing new features to make it even easier to develop apps for cars and TV this year. Catch the “What’s new with Android for Cars” and “What's new with Google TV and Android TV” sessions on Day 2 (May 12th) at 9:00 AM PT to learn more.

#8: Add Voice Across Devices

We’re making it easier for users to access your apps via voice across devices with Google Assistant, by expanding developer access to Shortcuts API for Android for Cars, with support for Wear OS apps coming later this year. We’re also making it easier to build those experiences with Smarter Custom Intents, enabling Assistant to better detect broader instances of user queries through ML, without any NLU training heavy lift. Additionally, we’re introducing improvements that drive discovery to your apps via voice on Mobile, first through Brandless Queries, that drive app usage even when the user hasn’t explicitly said your app’s name, and App Install Suggestions that appear if your isn’t installed yet–these are automatically enabled for existing App Actions today.

AND THE LATEST FROM ANDROID, PLAY, AND MORE:

#9: What’s new in Play!

Get the latest updates from Google Play, including new ways Play can help you grow your business. Highlights include the ability to deep-link and create up to 50 custom listings; our LiveOps beta, which will allow more developers to submit content to be considered for featuring on the Play Store; and even more flexibility in selling subscriptions. Learn about these updates and more in our blog post.

#10: Google Play SDK Index

Evaluate if an SDK is right for your app with the new Google Play SDK index. This new public portal lists over 100 of the most widely used commercial SDKs and information like which app permissions the SDK requests, statistics on the apps that use them, and which version of the SDK is most popular. Learn more on our blog post and watch “What’s new in Google Play” and “What’s new in Android development tools” sessions.

#11: Privacy Sandbox on Android

Privacy Sandbox on Android provides a path for new advertising solutions to improve user privacy without putting access to free content and services at risk. We recently released the first Privacy Sandbox on Android Developer Preview so you can get an early look at the SDK Runtime and Topics API. You can conduct preliminary testing of these new technologies, evaluate how you might adopt them for your solutions, and share feedback with us.

#12: The new Google Wallet API

The new Google Wallet gives users fast and secure access to everyday essentials across Android and Wear OS. We’re enhancing the Google Wallet API, previously called Google Pay Passes API, to support generic passes, grouping and mixing passes together, for example grouping an event ticket with a voucher, and launching a new Android SDK which allows you to save passes directly from your app without a backend integration. To learn more, read the full blog post, watch the session, or read the docs at developers.google.com/wallet.

#13: And of course, Android 13!

The second Beta of Android 13 is available today! Get your apps ready for the latest features for privacy and security, like the new notification permission, the privacy-protecting photo picker, and improved permissions for pairing with nearby devices and accessing media files. Enhance your app with features like app-specific language support and themed app icons. Build with modern standards like HDR video and Bluetooth LE Audio. You can get started by enrolling your Pixel device here, or try Android 13 Beta on select phones, tablets, and foldables from our partners - visit developer.android.com/13 to learn more.

That’s just a snapshot of some of the highlights for Android developers at this year’s Google I/O. Be sure to watch the What’s New in Android talk to get the landscape on the full Android technical track at Google I/O, which includes 26 talks and 4 workshops. Enjoy!