The Android KitKat (KK) platform was first released ~10 years ago and since then, we’ve introduced many innovative improvements and features for Android, which are unavailable on KK. As of July 2023, the active device count on KK is below 1% as more and more users update to the latest Android versions. Therefore, we are no longer supporting KK in future releases of Google Play services. KK devices will not receive versions of the Play Services APK beyond 23.30.99.
The Android KitKat (KK) platform was first released ~10 years ago and since then, we’ve introduced many innovative improvements and features for Android, which are unavailable on KK. As of July 2023, the active device count on KK is below 1% as more and more users update to the latest Android versions. Therefore, we are no longer supporting KK in future releases of Google Play services. KK devices will not receive versions of the Play Services APK beyond 23.30.99.
As a platform, we always want to help developers bring innovative ideas to life. Google Play hosts a variety of blockchain related apps, and we know that our partners are excited to expand on these offerings to create more engaging and immersive digital experiences with tokenized digital assets such as NFTs. Like with any emerging technology, we must balance innovation with our responsibility to protect users. So, we’ve spoken with developers about responsibly supporting those opportunities while continuing to provide a safe, transparent, and trusted experience for everyone.
Today, we’re pleased to share that we’re updating our policy to open new ways to transact blockchain-based digital content within apps and games on Google Play. From reimagining traditional games with user-owned content to boosting user loyalty through unique NFT rewards, we’re excited to see creative in-app experiences flourish and help developers expand their businesses.
As blockchain technology continues to evolve, maintaining user trust is paramount. As part of the policy update, we’re requiring that apps be transparent with users about tokenized digital assets. For example, if an app or game sells or enables users to earn tokenized digital assets, developers must declare this clearly. And while tokenized assets are meant to build more enriched, immersive experiences, as an added user protection, developers may not promote or glamorize any potential earning from playing or trading activities.
In line with Google Play’s Real-Money Gambling, Games, and Contests policy, apps that have not met gambling eligibility requirements cannot accept money for a chance to win assets of unknown real-world monetary value, including NFTs. For example, developers should not offer purchases where the value of the NFT users receive is not clear at the time of purchase. This includes, but is not limited to, offering mechanisms to receive randomized blockchain-based items from a purchase such as “loot boxes”.
Unlocking Innovation Across the Industry
Google Play succeeds when our partners succeed. These new guidelines were developed in close consultation with app and game developers and incorporates their feedback on how we can continue to support their businesses.
"We really appreciate Google's partnership in this collaborative effort to bring about innovation in this space and move these new economies forward. We think these new policies are steps forward for both players and developers alike and will positively impact the adoption of new technology while also protecting consumers."– John Linden, CEO, Mythical Games
"At Reddit we believe in empowering our users by providing transparency and a responsible approach to blockchain-based digital content – like our Collectible Avatars. We partnered with Google to help update their policy, aimed at creating a level playing field that promotes user trust, and responsible usage of blockchain technology. By setting clear guidelines, we can ensure that our users make informed decisions while enjoying immersive experiences."
– Matt Williamson, Senior Engineering Manager, Reddit
We will continue to engage with developers to understand their challenges and opportunities — and how we can best support them in building sustainable businesses using blockchain technology. As a next step, we’re talking to industry partners about further improving our support of blockchain-based app experiences, including in areas such as secondary markets.
We’ll keep you posted on our progress. In the meantime, we’re excited to see how today’s blockchain policy announcement brings more fun and delight to apps and games across Google Play.
For more on the blockchain policy and other changes announced today:
Today we're bringing you Android 14 Beta 4, continuing our work on polish and performance as we get closer to the general availability release of Android 14. Beta 4 is available for Pixel Tablet and Pixel Fold, in addition to the rest of the supported Pixel family, so you can test your applications on devices spanning multiple form factors and directly experience the work we're doing to improve the large-screen and foldable device experience.
Beta 4 is our second Platform Stable Android 14 release, which means that the developer APIs and all app-facing behaviors are final for you to review and integrate into your apps, and you can publish apps on Google Play to devices running Android 14 at the official API level.
It's a good time to finish compatibility testing and publish any necessary updates to ensure a smooth app experience ahead of the final release of Android 14 later this year.
If you develop an SDK, library, tool, or game engine, it's even more important to release any necessary updates now to prevent your downstream app and game developers from being blocked with compatibility issues. Also, when you release a compatible update, please make sure to let your developers know.
Each release of Android contains changes to the platform that improve privacy, security, and the overall user experience. These changes can affect your apps. Testing your app involves installing your production app onto a device running Android 14 Beta 4; you can use Google Play or other means. Work through all the app's flows and look for functional or UI issues. Review the behavior changes to focus your testing.
Today's Beta 4 release has everything you need to try Android 14 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. The easiest way to get started is using the 64-bit Android Emulator system images for the Pixel Tablet or Pixel Fold configurations found in the latest preview of the Android Studio SDK Manager. You can also enroll any supported Pixel device here — including the new Pixel 7a, Pixel Tablet, and the Pixel Fold — to get this and future Android 14 Beta and feature drop Beta updates over-the-air.
- Try the new features and APIs. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
- Test your current app for compatibility – learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 14. Install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 14 and extensively test it.
- Test your app with opt-in changes – Android 14 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.
- Update your app with the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant - Android Studio Hedgehog now filters and identifies the specific Android 14 API changes that are relevant to your app, and walks you through the steps to upgrade your targetSdkVersion with the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant.
We’ll update the beta system images regularly throughout the Android 14 release cycle.
If you are already enrolled in the Android 14 Beta program and your device is supported, Beta 4 will be made available to you as an Over The Air update without taking any additional action.
For complete information on how to get the Beta, visit the Android 14 developer site.
With today's Android 14 Beta 3 release, we're continuing into the next phase of the Android development cycle. It builds upon our core themes of privacy, security, performance, developer productivity, and user customization while continuing to improve the large-screen device experience on tablets, foldables, and more.
Beta 3 takes Android 14 to Platform Stability, which means that the developer APIs and all app-facing behaviors are now final for you to review and integrate into your apps. Thank you for all of your continued feedback in getting us to this milestone.
There's a lot to explore in Android 14 and test in your apps. Today with Beta 3, we’re highlighting new accessibility features such as non-linear font scaling, privacy upgrades including partial photos/videos access, new animation support in gesture navigation, and features that further align with the OpenJDK 17 LTS release.
With Platform Stability in Beta 3, you can confidently develop and release any necessary compatibility updates. Please start your final compatibility testing now and prepare to publish any necessary updates so you can get valuable feedback during the remainder of the beta releases. This will help ensure a smooth app experience ahead of the final release of Android 14 later this year.
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If you develop an SDK, library, tool, or game engine, it's even more important to be testing now so you can release your compatible updates as soon as possible to prevent your downstream app and game developers from being blocked with compatibility issues. Also, when you've released a compatible update, please make sure to let your developers know.
Each release of Android contains changes to the platform that improve privacy, security, and the overall user experience. These changes can affect your apps. Testing your app involves installing your production app onto a device running Android 14 Beta 3; you can use Google Play or other means. Work through all the app's flows and look for functional or UI issues. Review the behavior changes to focus your testing. Changes that may impact your app include:
Please review the behavior changes section to see all of the changes that may impact the compatibility of your app or game. If you find any issues with libraries and SDKs in your app, try updating to the latest library or SDK version, reaching out to the developer for help if necessary.
Once you’ve published the compatible version of your current app, you can start the process to update your app's targetSdkVersion. Review the behavior changes for apps targeting Android 14 and consider using the compatibility framework to help you detect issues quickly. Here are some of the changes to test for (these apply only to apps with targetSdkVersion set to API 34 or higher):
Today's Beta 3 release has everything you need to try the Android 14 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. For testing your app with tablets and foldables, you can test with devices from our partners, but the easiest way to get started is using the 64-bit Android Emulator system images for the Pixel Tablet or Pixel Fold configurations found in the latest preview of the Android Studio SDK Manager. You can also enroll any supported Pixel device here, including the new Pixel 7a, to get this and future Android 14 Beta and feature drop Beta updates over-the-air.
For the best development experience with Android 14, we recommend that you use the latest release of Android Studio Hedgehog. Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:
- Try the new features and APIs. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
- Test your current app for compatibility – learn whether your app is affected by default behavior changes in Android 14. Install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 14 and extensively test it.
- Test your app with opt-in changes – Android 14 has opt-in behavior changes that only affect your app when it’s targeting the new platform. It’s important to understand and assess these changes early. To make it easier to test, you can toggle the changes on and off individually.
We’ll update the beta system images regularly throughout the Android 14 release cycle.
If you are already enrolled in the Android 14 Beta program and your device is supported, Beta 3 will be made available to you as an Over The Air update without taking any additional action.For complete information on how to get the Beta, visit the Android 14 developer site.
Java and OpenJDK are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last year, we introduced new capabilities for subscriptions on Google Play, giving you more flexibility and control when it comes to growing and retaining your subscribers. The enhanced developer experience enabled by the monetization.subscriptions APIs, separates your subscription products - what you sell - from how you sell them, allowing you to configure multiple base plans and offers for each subscription. The new model is designed to reduce the complexity and overhead of managing your product configuration - this means:
Starting on January 1, 2024, all new apps must use monetization.subscriptions APIs for managing your subscriptions catalog. Existing apps will have until May 1, 2024 to migrate to the new monetization.subscriptions APIs, at which point support for using the InAppProducts API for managing your subscriptions catalog will end completely.
Starting this month, if we detect that your app has used the InAppProducts API to manage your subscriptions within the last 7 days, you will start seeing a reminder in Play Console to migrate over to monetization.subscriptions APIs.
Additionally, if your app is not using the latest version of Play Billing Library, you’ll need to upgrade to version 5.0 or later before November of this year in order to publish updates to your app.
If you continue to use the InAppProduct API while support is still available, the subscription SKUs you create will be automatically converted into the new model following the backward compatible structure represented below with limited access to new features. Learn more about converted subscriptions here.
New model separates your subscription products – what you sell – from how you sell them.
This deprecation will only impact the InAppProducts API when used to manage your subscription product catalog in Play Console. All apps can continue using the InAppProducts API to manage one-time products. The Play Billing Library and Subscription Purchase APIs will not be impacted. Note that both InAppProducts API and monetization.subscriptions APIs are for managing your subscription catalog on Play from your backend, and should not be called directly as part of any in-app flows.
If you use the Google Play Developer API client libraries - available for Java, Python, and other popular languages - we recommend upgrading to the latest versions, which already include the monetization.subscriptions APIs. Base plans can be managed with the monetization.subscription.basePlans API, and introductory pricing and free trials can be managed as offers with the monetization.subscriptions.basePlans.offers API.
To use the new monetization.subscriptions APIs with existing subscriptions, make sure that you’ve made your pre-existing subscriptions editable in Play Console.
Start maximizing the latest subscription capabilities available with the monetization.subscriptions APIs. Learn more by visiting the Help Center, getting started guide, documentation, and sample app.
It has been almost two years since we launched the first stable version of Jetpack Compose, and since then, we’ve seen its adoption and feature set grow spectacularly. Whether you write an application for smartphones, foldables, tablets, ChromeOS devices, smartwatches, or TVs, Compose has got you covered! We recommend you to use Compose for all new Wear OS, phone and large-screen apps. With new tooling and library features, extended Material Design 3, large screen, and Wear OS support, and alpha versions of Compose for homescreen widgets and TV… This is an exciting time!
In the last year, we’ve seen many companies investigating and choosing Compose to build new features and migrate screens in their production applications. 24% of the top 1000 apps on Google Play have already chosen to adopt Compose! For example, Dropbox engineers told us that they rewrote their search experience in Compose in just a few weeks, which was 40% less time than anticipated, and less than half the time it took the team to build the feature on iOS. They also shared that they were interested in adopting Compose “because of its first-class support for design systems and tooling support”. Our Google Drive team cut their development time nearly in half when using Compose combined with architecture improvements.
It’s great to see how these teams experience faster development cycles, and also feel their UI code is more testable. Inspired? Start by reading our guide How to Adopt Compose for your Team, which outlines how and where to start, and shows the areas of development where Compose can bring huge added value.
Since we released the first Compose Bill of Materials in October last year, we’ve been working on new features, bug fixes, performance improvements, and bringing Compose to everywhere you build UI: phones, tablets, foldables, watches, TV, and your home screen. You can find all changes in the May 2023 release and the latest alpha versions of the Compose libraries.
We’ve heard from you that performance is something you care about, and that it’s not always clear how to create performant Compose applications. We’re continuously improving the performance of Compose. For example, as of last October, we started migrating modifiers to a new and more efficient system, and we’re starting to see the results of that migration. For text alone, this work resulted in an average 22% performance gain that can be seen in the latest alpha release, and these improvements apply across the board. To get these benefits in your app, all you have to do is update your Compose version!
Text and TextField got many upgrades in the past months. Next to the performance improvements we already mentioned, Compose now supports the latest emoji version
The new pager component allows you to horizontally or vertically flip through content, which is similar to ViewPager2 in Views. It allows deep customization options, making it possible to create visually stunning effects:
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| Choose a song using the HorizontalPager composable. Learn how to implement this and other fancy effects in Rebecca Franks' blog post. |
The new flow layouts FlowRow and FlowColumn make it easy to arrange content in a vertical or horizontal flow, much like lines of text in a paragraph. They also enable dynamic sizing using weights to distribute the items across the container.
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| Using flow layouts to show the search filters in a real estate app |
To learn more about the new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes, see the release notes of the latest stable and newest alpha release of the Compose libraries.
Developing your app using Jetpack Compose is much easier with the new and improved tools around it. We added tons of new features to Android Studio to improve your workflow and efficiency. Here are some highlights:
Android Studio Flamingo is the latest stable release, bringing you:
- Project templates that use Compose and Material 3 by default, reflecting our recommended practices.
- Material You dynamic colors in Compose previews to quickly see how your composable responds to differently colored wallpapers on a user device.
- Compose functions in system traces when you use the System Trace profiler to help you understand which Compose functions are being recomposed.
Android Studio Giraffe is the latest beta release, containing features such as:
- Live Edit, allowing you to quickly iterate on your code on emulator or physical device without rebuilding or redeploying your app.
- Support for new animations APIs in Animation preview so you can debug any animations using animate*AsState, CrossFade, rememberInfiniteTransition, and AnimatedContent.
- Compose Preview now supports live updates across multiple files, for example, if you make a change in your Theme.kt file, you can see all Previews updates automatically in your UI files.
- Improving auto-complete behavior. For example, we now show icon previews when you’re adding Material icons, and we keep the @Composable annotation when running “Implement Members".
Android Studio Hedgehog contains canary features such as:
- Showing Compose state information in the debugger. While debugging your app, the debugger will tell you exactly which parameters have “Changed” or have remained “Unchanged”, so you can more efficiently investigate the cause of the recomposition.
- You can try out the new Studio Bot, an experimental AI powered conversational experience in Android Studio to help you generate code, fix issues, and learn about best practices, including all things Compose. This is an early experiment, but we would love for you to give it a try!
- Emulator support for the newly announced Pixel Fold and Tablet Virtual Devices, so that you can test your Compose app before these devices launch later this year.
- A new Espresso Device API that lets you apply rotation changes, folds, and other synchronous configuration changes to your virtual devices under test.
We’re also actively working on visual linting and accessibility checks for previews so you can automatically audit your Compose UI and check for issues across different screen sizes, and on multipreview templates to help you quickly add common sets of previews.
Material 3 is the recommended design system for Android apps, and the latest 1.1 stable release adds a lot of great new features. We added new components like bottom sheets, date and time pickers, search bars, tooltips, and others. We also graduated many of the core components to stable, added more motion and interaction support, and included edge-to-edge support in many components. Watch this video to learn how to implement Material You in your app:
We want Compose to be the programming model for UI wherever you run Android. This means including first-class support for large screens such as foldables and tablets and publishing libraries that make it possible to use Compose to write your homescreen widgets, smartwatch apps, and TV applications.
We’ve continued our efforts to make development for large screens easy when you use Compose. The pager and flow layouts that we released are common patterns on large screen devices. In addition, we added a new Compose library that lets you observe the device’s window size class so you can easily build adaptive UI.
When attaching a mouse to an Android device, Compose now correctly changes the mouse cursor to a caret when you hover the cursor over text fields or selectable text. This helps the user to understand what elements on screen they can interact with.
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Today we publish the first beta version of the Jetpack Glance library! Glance lets you develop widgets optimized for Android phone, tablet, and foldable homescreens using Jetpack Compose. The library gives you the latest Android widget improvements out of the box, using Kotlin and Compose:
- Glance simplifies the implementation of interactive widgets, so you can showcase your app’s top features, right on a user’s home screen.
- Glance makes it easy to build responsive widgets that look great across form factors.
- Glance enables faster UI Iteration with your designers, ensuring a high quality user experience.
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We launched Compose for Wear OS 1.1 stable last December, and we’re working hard on the new 1.2 release which is currently in alpha. Here’s some of the highlights of the continuous improvements and new features that we are bringing to your wrist:
- The
placeholderandplaceholderShimmeradd elegant loading animations that can be used on chips and cards while content is loading.expandableItemsmake it possible to fold long lists or long text, and only expand to show their full length upon user interaction.- Rotary input enhancements available in Horologist add intuitive
snapandflingbehaviors when a user is navigating lists with rotary input.- Android Studio now lets you preview multiple watch screen and text sizes while building a Compose app. Use the Annotations that we have added here.
You can now build pixel perfect living room experiences with the alpha release of Compose for TV! With the new AndroidX TV library, you can apply all of the benefits of Compose to the unique requirements for Android TV. We worked closely with the community to build an intuitive API with powerful capabilities. Engineers from Soundcloud shared with us that “thanks to Compose for TV, we are able to reuse components and move much faster than the old Leanback View APIs would have ever allowed us to.” And Plex shared that “TV focus and scrolling support on Compose has greatly improved our developer productivity and app performance.”
Compose for TV comes with a variety of components such as ImmersiveList and Carousel that are specifically optimized for the living room experience. With just a few lines of code, you can create great TV UIs.
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TvLazyColumn {
items(contentList) { content ->
TvLazyRow {
items(content) { cardItem ->
Card(cardItem)
}
}
} |
Learn more about the release in this blog post, check out the “What’s new with TV and intro to Compose” talk, or see the TV documentation!
It’s great to see more and more internally and externally developed libraries add support for Compose. For example, loading pictures asynchronously can now be done with the GlideImage composable from the Glide library. And Google Maps released a library which makes it much easier to declaratively create your map implementations.
GoogleMap(
//...
) {
Marker(
state = MarkerState(position = LatLng(-34, 151)),
title = "Marker in Sydney"
)
Marker(
state = MarkerState(position = LatLng(35.66, 139.6)),
title = "Marker in Tokyo"
)
} |
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:
- Learn hands-on with the Compose for Android Developers course, where you can learn the basics and deep dive into layouts, state, form factors, and more. We updated the course to include all the latest resources.
- If you prefer watching videos, following on the well-received Compose Basics MAD Skills series, we recently published a new MAD Skills series on Layouts and Modifiers. With five episodes covering everything from the fundamentals to advanced concepts and functionality, a Q&A with Googlers, and a community tip, this series will help you to quickly improve your Compose Layout knowledge.
- Make sure to check out all compose-related I/O talks: Debugging Jetpack Compose, What's new with TV and intro to Compose, How to build great Android apps for large screens and foldables, How to test for all screen sizes, and Build modern Android apps with Material You for Compose, or code along with the instructor-led workshop on Advanced State and Side effects in Compose.
- Read the expanded guidance on Touch and input, including a new page on understanding gestures, and a brand-new section on how to handle focus.
- Learn how to implement Material 3 theming in your app with the new codelab.
We hope 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 productivity. Happy Composing!
Android Jetpack is a key pillar 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 so that you can focus on building unique features for your app. The majority of apps on Google Play rely on Jetpack, in fact over 90% of the top 1000 apps use Jetpack.
Below we’ll cover highlights of recent updates in three major areas of Jetpack:
- Architecture Libraries and Guidance
- Performance Optimization of Applications
- User Interface Libraries and Guidance
And then conclude with some additional key updates.
App architecture libraries and components ensure that apps are robust, testable, and maintainable.
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, we have added many brand-new features, such as the Upsert operation, which attempts to insert an entity when there is no uniqueness conflict or update the entity if there is a conflict, and support for using Kotlin value classes for KSP. These new features are available in Room 2.6-alpha with all library sources written in Kotlin and supports both the Java programming language and Kotlin code generation.
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.
Now, WorkManager allows you to update a WorkRequest after you have already enqueued it. This is often necessary in larger apps that frequently change constraints or need to update their workers on the fly. As of WorkManager 2.8.0, the updateWork() API is the means of doing this without having to go through the process of manually canceling and enqueuing a new WorkRequest. This greatly simplifies the development process.
The DataStore library is a robust data storage solution that addresses issues with SharedPreferences and provides a modern coroutines based API.
In DataStore 1.1 alpha we added a widely requested feature: multi-process support which allows you to access the DataStore from multiple processes while providing data consistency guarantees between them. Additional features include a new storage interface that enables the underlying storage mechanism for Datastore to be switched out (we have provided implementations for java.io and okio), and we have also added support for Kotlin Multiplatform.
Lifecycle-aware components perform actions in response to a change in the lifecycle status of another component, such as activities and fragments. These components help you produce better-organized, and often lighter-weight code, that is easier to maintain.
We released a stable version of Lifecycle 2.6.0 that includes more Compose integration. We added a new extension method on Flow, collectAsStateWithLifecycle(), that collects from flows and represents its latest value as Compose State in a lifecycle-aware manner. Additionally, a large number of classes are converted to Kotlin and still retain their binary compatibility with previous versions.
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In Android 13, we introduced a predictive back gesture for Android devices such as phones, large screens, and foldables. It is part of a multi-year release; when fully implemented, this feature will let users preview the destination or other result of a back gesture before fully completing it, allowing them to decide whether to continue or stay in the current view.
The Activity APIs for Predictive Back for Android are stable and we have updated the best practices for using the supported system back callbacks; BackHandler (for Compose), OnBackPressedCallback, or OnBackInvokedCallback. We are excited to see Google apps adopt Predictive Back including PlayStore, Calendar, News, and TV!
In the Activity 1.8 alpha releases, The OnBackPressedCallback class now contains new Predictive Back progress callbacks for handling the back gesture starting, progress throughout the gesture, and the back gesture being canceled in addition to the previous handleOnBackPressed() callback for when the back gesture is committed. We also added ComponentActivity.setUpEdgeToEdge() to easily set up the edge-to-edge display in a backward-compatible manner.
The Android photo picker is a browsable interface that presents the user with their media library. In Activity 1.7.0, the Photo Picker activity contracts have been updated to contain an additional fallback that allows OEMs and system apps, such as Google Play services, to provide a consistent Photo Picker experience on a wider range of Android devices and API levels by implementing the fallback action. Read more in the Photo Picker Everywhere blog.
The Paging library allows you to load and display small chunks of data to improve network and system resource consumption. App data can be loaded gradually and gracefully within RecyclerViews or Compose lazy lists.
In Paging Compose 1.0.0-alpha19, there is support for all lazy layouts including custom layouts provided by the Wear and TV libraries. To support more lazy layouts, Paging Compose now provides slightly lower level extension methods on LazyPagingItems in itemKey and itemContentType. These APIs focus on helping you implement the key and contentType parameters to the standard items APIs that already exist for LazyColumn, LazyVerticalGrid as well as their equivalents in APIs like HorizontalPager. While these changes do make the LazyColumn and LazyRow examples a few lines longer, it provides consistency across all lazy layouts.
Using performance libraries allows you to build performant apps and identify optimizations to maintain high performance, resulting in better end-user experiences.
Baseline Profiles allow you to partially compile your app at install time to improve runtime and launch performance, and are getting big improvements in new tooling and libraries:
Jetpack provides a new Baseline Profile Gradle Plugin in alpha, which supports AGP 8.0+, and can be easily added to your project in Studio Hedgehog (now in canary). The plugin lets you automate the task of running generation tasks, and pulling profiles from the device and integrating them into your build either periodically, or as part of your release process.
The plugin also allows you to easily automate the new Dex Layout Optimization feature in AGP 8.1, which lets you define BaselineProfileRule tests that collect classes used during startup, and move them to the primary dex file in a multidex app to increase locality. In a large app, this can improve cold startup time by 30% on top of Baseline Profiles!
Macrobenchmark 1.2 has shipped a lot of new features in alpha, such as Power metrics and Custom trace metrics, generation of Baseline Profiles without root on Android 13, and recompilation without clearing app data on Android 14.
You can read everything in depth in the blog "What's new in Android Performance".
Several changes have been made to our UI libraries to provide better support for large-screen compatibility, foldables, and emojis.
Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern toolkit for building native UI, recently had its May 2023 release which includes new features for text and layouts, continued performance improvements, enhanced tooling support, increased support for large screens, and updated guidance. You can read more in the What’s New in Jetpack Compose I/O blog to learn more.
The Glance library, now in 1.0-beta, lets you develop app widgets optimized for Android phone, tablet, and foldable homescreens using Jetpack Compose. The library gives you the latest Android widget improvements out of the box, using Kotlin and Compose.
With the alpha release of the TV library, you can now build experiences for Android TV using components optimized for the living room experience. Compose for TV unlocks all the benefits of Jetpack Compose for your TV apps, allowing you to build apps with less code, easier maintenance and a modern Material 3 look straight out of the box. See the Compose for TV blog for details.
Material Design 3 is the next evolution of Material Design, enabling you to build expressive, spirited and personal apps. It is the recommended design system for Android apps and the 1.1 stable release brings exciting new features such as bottom sheets, date and time pickers, search bars, tooltips, and added more motion and interaction support. Read more in the release blog.
The new WindowManager library helps developers adapt their apps to support multi-window environments and new device form factors by providing a common API surface with support back to API level 14.
In 1.1.0-beta01, new features and capabilities have been added to activity embedding and window layout that enables you to optimize your multi-activity apps for large screens. With the 1.1 release of Jetpack WindowManager, activity embedding APIs are no longer experimental and are recommended for multi-activity applications to provide improved large screen layouts. Check out the What’s new in WindowManager 1.1.0-beta01 blog for details and migration steps.
We continue to experiment with using Kotlin Multiplatform to share business logic between Android and iOS. The Collections 1.3.0-alpha03 and DataStore 1.1.0-alpha02 have been updated so you can now use these libraries in KMM projects. If you are using Kotlin Multiplatform in your app, we would like your feedback!
This was a look at all the changes in Jetpack over the past few months to help you build apps more productively. 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 I/O talks for additional highlights.
Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
We first announced Android Studio at I/O 2013 with a promise to deliver a best-in-class integrated development environment (IDE) focused on Android app developers. 10 years later, this commitment to developer productivity still drives the team to deliver new tools and solutions that help teams around the world to create amazing app experiences for their users. And with Google's push to unlock the power of AI to help you throughout your day, Android Studio Hedgehog introduces a key breakthrough: an AI-powered conversational experience designed to make you more productive.
In addition to accelerating coding productivity, this latest version of the IDE provides better tools when you develop for multiple form factors, and helps you improve app quality with new insights, debugging, and testing solutions. All these improvements add to the many updates we’ve included in Android Studio Giraffe, which is now in the Beta channel and helps make it easier to configure your builds with Kotlin DSL support, improve sync times with new data and guidance, target the latest Android SDK version with the new Android SDK Upgrade Assistant, and more.
To see highlights of the new features in action including Studio Bot, watch the What’s new in Android Developer Tools session from Google I/O 2023.
| What’s new in Android Development Tools - with Studio Bot Demo |
Jump right in and download Android Studio Hedgehog, or learn more about the most exciting new features below.
At the heart of our mission is to accelerate your ability to write high-quality code for Android. In this release we are excited to introduce an AI-powered conversational experience called Studio Bot, that leverages Codey, Google's foundation model for coding that is a descendant of PaLM 2, to help you generate code for your app and make you more productive. You can also ask questions to learn more about Android development or help fix errors in your existing code — all without ever having to leave Android Studio. Studio Bot is in its very early days, and we’re training it to become even better at answering your questions and helping you learn best practices. We encourage you to try it out for yourselves, and help it improve by sharing your feedback directly with Studio Bot.
Privacy is top of mind, and what is unique in this integration is that you don’t need to send your source code to Google to use Studio Bot—only the chat dialogue between you and Studio Bot is shared. Much like our work on other AI projects, we stick to a set of principles that hold us accountable. We’re taking a measured approach to our rollout; for this initial launch, Studio Bot is only available to Android developers in the US. You can read more here
| Studio Bot |
Live Edit helps keep you in the flow by minimizing interruptions when you make updates to your Compose UI and validates those changes on a running device. You can use it in manual mode to control when the running app should be updated or in automatic mode to update the running app as you make code changes. Live Edit is available in Android Studio Giraffe Beta, with the Hedgehog release providing additional improvements in error handling and reporting.
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| Live Edit with Compose |
A number of updates help you leverage more modern syntax and conventions when configuring your build. Kotlin is the recommended language when developing for Android. Now, with official support for Kotlin DSL in your Gradle build scripts, it’s also the preferred way to configure your build because Kotlin is more readable and offers better compile-time checking and IDE support. Additionally, we’ve also added experimental support for TOML-based Gradle Version Catalogs, a feature that lets you manage dependencies in one central location and share dependencies across modules or projects. Android Studio now makes it easier to configure version catalogs through editor suggestions and integrations with the Project Structure dialog, plus the New Project Wizard.
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| Kotlin DSL and Version Catalogs in the New Project Wizard |
Typically, multilingual users set their system language to one language—such as English—but they want to select other languages for specific apps, such as Dutch, Chinese, or Hindi. Android 13 introduced support for per-app language preferences, and now Android Gradle plugin 8.1 and higher can configure your app to support it automatically. Learn more.
When using Android Gradle Plugin 7.3 or higher, The Build > Sync tool window now includes a summary of time spent downloading dependencies and a detailed view of downloads per repository, so you can easily determine whether unexpected downloads are impacting build performance. Additionally, it can help you identify inefficiencies in how you configure your repositories. Learn more.
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| Build Analyzer showing impact of downloads during build |
Android Studio Giraffe introduces the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant, a new tool that helps you upgrade the targetSdkVersion, which is the API level that your app targets. Instead of having to navigate every API change with an Android SDK release, the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant guides you through upgrading targetSdkVersion level by level by creating a customized filter of API changes that are relevant to your app. For each migration step, it highlights the major breaking changes and how to address them, helping you get to taking advantage of what the latest versions of Android have to offer much more quickly. To open the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant, go to Tools > Android SDK Upgrade Assistant. In the Assistant panel, select the API level that you want to upgrade to for guidance.
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| Upgrade more quickly with the Android SDK Upgrade Assistant |
Although these devices won’t launch until later this year, you can start preparing your app to take full advantage of the expanded screen sizes and functionality of these devices by creating virtual devices using new Google Pixel Fold and Google Pixel Tablet device profiles in Android Studio Hedgehog. To start, open Device Manager and select Create Device.
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| Pixel Tablet running on the Android Emulator |
Wear OS 4 is the next generation OS for Wear. Based on Android 13, it officially launches in the fall and has a great selection of new features and optimizations. We’re giving you a preview of all the new platform features with the new Wear OS 4 emulator. We recommend you try it with Android Studio Hedgehog and test that your Wear OS app works as intended with the latest platform updates. The Wear OS 4 emulator will give you a faster and smoother transition to Wear OS 4, and help you make apps ready in time for the official Wear OS 4 release on real devices. Check out the Wear 4 Preview site for how to get started with the new Wear OS 4 emulator.
Together with Samsung, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Watch Face Format, a new way to build watch faces for Wear OS. The Watch Face Format is a declarative XML format, meaning there will be no code in your watch face APK. The platform takes care of the logic needed to render the watch face so you no longer have to worry about code optimizations or battery performance. Use watch face creation tools such as Watch Face Studio to design watch faces, or you can manually or dynamically edit the watch face format to build watch faces directly. You can test the new Watch Face Format on the Wear OS 4 emulator.
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| Watch Face Format Watchface on Wear 4 Emulator |
Whether you use a direct USB connection or ADB over Wi-Fi, Device Mirroring lets you see and interact with your local physical devices directly within the Android Studio Running Devices window. This feature lets you focus on how you develop and test your app all in one place. With the Hedgehog release, we’re adding more functionality, including the ability to mirror Wear OS devices and simulate folding actions on foldable devices directly from the IDE.
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| Device Mirroring with the Pixel Fold |
We know sometimes it’s critical for you to see and test how your apps work on physical hardware to ensure that your users have the best experience. However, accessing the latest flagship devices isn’t always easy. Building on top of Device Mirroring for local devices, we’re introducing device streaming of remote physical Google Pixel devices, such as the Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet, directly within Android Studio. Device streaming will let you deploy your app to these remote devices and interact with them, all without having to leave the IDE. If you’re interested in getting early access later this year, enroll now.
Automated testing of your app using Espresso APIs helps you catch potential issues early, before they reach users. However, testing your app across configuration changes, such as rotating or folding a device, has always been a challenge. Espresso Device API is now available to help you write tests that perform synchronous configuration changes when testing on Android virtual devices running API level 24 and higher. You can also set up test filters to ensure that tests that require certain device features, such as a folding action, only run on devices that support them. Learn more.
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| Synchronous device configuration changes using the Espresso Device API |
App Quality Insights launched in Android Studio Electric Eel to provide access to Firebase Crashlytics issue reports directly from the IDE. The integration lets you navigate between your stack trace and code with a click, use filters to see only the most important issues, and see report details to help you reproduce issues. In Android Studio Hedgehog, you can now view important crash reports from Android vitals, powered by Google Play. Android vitals reports also include useful insights, such as notes from SDK providers so that you can quickly diagnose and resolve crashes related to SDKs your app might be using.
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| Android vitals crash reports in the App Quality Insights window |
When you publish your app using the latest version of AGP 8.2, crash reports now attach minimal git commit hash data to help Android Studio navigate to your code when investigating Crashlytics crash reports in the IDE. Now, when you view a report that includes the necessary metadata, you can choose to either navigate to the line of code in your current git checkout, or view a diff between the checkout and the version of your codebase that generated the crash. To get started with the right dependencies, see the documentation.
When parts of your Compose UI recompose unexpectedly, it can sometimes be difficult to understand why. Now, when setting a breakpoint on a Composable function, the debugger lists the parameters of the composable and their state, so you can more easily identify what changes might have caused the recomposition. For example, when you pause on a composable, the debugger can tell you exactly which parameters have “Changed” or have remained “Unchanged”, so you can more efficiently investigate the cause of the recomposition.
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| Compose state information in the debugger |
We are excited to announce a brand new Power Profiler in Android Studio Hedgehog, which shows power consumption on the Pixel 6 and higher devices running Android 10 and higher. Data is segmented by each sub-system (such as, Camera, GPS, and more). This data is made available when recording a System Trace via the Profiler and helps you to visually correlate power consumption of the device to the actions happening in your app. For example, you can A/B test multiple algorithms of your video calling app to optimize power consumed by the camera sensor.
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| The new Power Profiler |
The Device File Explorer in Giraffe has been renamed to Device Explorer and updated to include information about debuggable processes running on connected devices. In addition to the Files tab, which includes existing functionality that allows you to explore a device’s file hierarchy, the new Processes tab allows you to view a list of debuggable processes for the connected device. From there you can also select a process and perform a Kill process action (which runs am kill), a Force stop (which runs am force-stop) , or attach the debugger to a selected process.
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| Processes tab in the Device Explorer window |
Compose Animation Preview in Android Studio Hedgehog now supports a number of additional Compose APIs, animate*AsState, CrossFade, rememberInfiniteTransition, and AnimatedContent (in addition to updateTransition and AnimatedVisibility). Compose Animation Preview also has new pickers that let you set non-enum or boolean states to debug your Compose animation using precise inputs. For all supported Compose Animation APIs, you can play, pause, scrub, control speed, and coordinate.
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| Compose Animation Preview |
You can now run Layout Inspector directly embedded in the Running Device Window in Android Studio! Try out this feature today in Android Studio Hedgehog to conserve screen real estate and organize your UI debugging workflow in a single tool window. You can access common Layout Inspector features such as debugging the layout of your app by showing a view hierarchy and allowing you to inspect the properties of each view. Additionally, because the embedded Layout Inspector overlays on top of the existing device mirroring stream, overall performance when using the inspector is now much faster. To get started and understand known limitations, read the release notes.
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| Embedded Layout Inspector |
Gradle Managed Devices launched in Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) 7.3 to make it easier to utilize virtual devices when running automated tests in your continuous integration (CI) infrastructure by allowing Gradle to manage all aspects of device provisioning. All you need to do is use the AGP DSL to describe the devices you wanted Gradle to use. But sometimes you need to run your tests on physical Android devices. With AGP 8.2, we have expanded Gradle Managed Devices with the ability to target real physical (and virtual) devices running in Firebase Test Lab (FTL). The capability makes it easier than ever to scalably test across the large selection of FTL devices with only a few simple steps. Additionally, this version of AGP can also take advantage of FTL’s new Smart Sharding capabilities, which allows you to get test results back much more quickly by utilizing multiple devices that run in parallel. To learn more and get started, read the release notes.
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| Gradle Managed Devices with support for Firebase Test Lab |
Android Studio Hedgehog (2023.1) includes the IntelliJ 2023.1 platform release, which comes with IDE startup performance improvements, faster import of Maven projects, and a more streamlined commit process. Read the IntelliJ release notes here.
Along with the IntelliJ platform update comes further improvements to the New UI. In large part due to community feedback, there’s a new Compact Mode, which provides a more consolidated look and feel of the IDE, and an option to vertically split the tool window area and conveniently arrange the windows, just like in the old UI. We also improved the Android-specific UI by updating the main toolbar, tool windows, and new iconography. To use the New UI, enable it in Settings > Appearance & Behavior > New UI. For a full list of changes, see the IntelliJ New UI documentation.
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| The New UI adopted from IntelliJ |
To recap, Android Studio Giraffe is available in the Beta channel. Android Studio Hedgehog is the latest version of the IDE and is available in the Canary channel, and includes all of these new enhancements and features:
- Android Studio Bot, is a tightly integrated, AI-powered assistant in Android Studio designed to make you more productive.
- (Beta) Live Edit, which helps keep you in the flow by minimizing interruptions when you make updates to your Compose UI and validate those changes on a running device.
- (Beta) Kotlin DSL and Version Catalogs, which helps you take advantage of more modern syntax and conventions when configuring your build.
- (Beta) Per-app language preferences, built-in support in AGP for automatically configuring per-app language preferences.
- (Beta) Download impact in Build Analyzer, which provides a summary of time spent downloading dependencies and a detailed view of downloads per repository, so you can easily determine whether unexpected downloads are impacting build performance.
- (Beta) New Android SDK Upgrade Assistant, which helps you upgrade the targetSdkVersion, which is the API level that your app targets, much more quickly.
- Google Pixel Fold and Google Pixel Tablet Virtual Devices, which can help you start preparing your app to take full advantage of the expanded screen sizes and functionality of these devices before they are available in stores.
- Wear OS 4 Developer Preview Emulator, which similarly provides you early access to test and optimize your app against the next generation of Wear OS by Google.
- Watch Face Format support in Wear OS 4 Developer Preview Emulator, a new way to build watch faces for Wear OS.
- Device Mirroring for local devices, which lets you see and interact with your local physical devices directly within Android Studio’s Running Devices window.
- Android Device Streaming, a device streaming of remote physical Google Pixel devices, which you can register for early access today!
- Espresso Device API, which helps you write tests that perform synchronous configuration changes when testing on Android virtual devices running API level 24 and higher.
- App Quality Insights: Android vitals, which now lets your view, filter, and navigate important crash reports from Android vitals, powered by Google Play.
- App Quality Insights with improved code navigation, which lets you now choose to either navigate to the line of code in your current git checkout, or view a diff between the checkout and the version of your codebase that generated the crash.
- Compose State information in Debugger, which lists the parameters of the composable and their state when paused on a breakpoint in a composable, so you can more easily identify what changes might have caused the recomposition.
- New Power Profiler, which shows highly accurate power consumption from the device segmented by each sub-system.
- (Beta) Device Explorer, which now includes information about debuggable processes running on connected devices and actions you can perform on them.
- (Beta) Compose animation preview, now supports a number of additional Compose APIs and new pickers that let you set non-enum or boolean states to debug your Compose animation using precise inputs.
- Embedded Layout Inspector, which runs Layout Inspector directly embedded in the Running Device Window in Android Studio, leading to a more seamless debugging experience and significant performance improvements.
- Firebase Test Lab support for Gradle Managed Devices, which leverages GMD to help you seamlessly configure Firebase Test Lab devices for your automated testing, and now with additional support for smart sharding.
- IntelliJ Platform Update to the IntelliJ 2023.1 platform release, which includes a number of performance and quality of life improvements.
- New UI update that allows Android Studio to adopt a number of improvements to IntilliJ’s modern design language.
See the Android Studio Preview release notes and the Android Emulator release notes for more details.
You can download Android Studio Hedgehog Canary or Android Studio Giraffe Beta today to incorporate the new features into your workflow. You can install them side by side with a stable version of Android Studio by following these instructions. The Beta release is near stable release quality, but bugs might still exist, and Canary features are leading edge features. As always, we appreciate any feedback on things you like or features you would like to see. If you find a bug, please report the issue and also check out known issues. Remember to also follow us on Twitter, Medium, or YouTube for more Android development updates!
Health and fitness data is interconnected – sleep, nutrition, workouts and more all inform one another. For example, consider that your sleep impacts your recovery, which impacts your readiness to run your favorite 5k. Over time, your recovery and workout habits drive metrics like heart rate variability, resting heart rate, VO2Max and more! Often this data exists in silos, making it hard for users to get a holistic view of their health data.
We want to make it simple for people to use their favorite apps and devices to track their health by bringing this data together. They should have full control of what data they share, and when they share it. And, we want to make sure developers can enable this with less complexity and fewer lines of code.
This is why we’ve continued to improve our Android Health offerings, and why today at I/O 2023, we’re announcing key updates across both Health Connect and Health Services for app developers and users.
Android Health brings together two important platforms for developers to deliver robust health and fitness app to users; Health Connect and Health Services.
Health Connect is an on-device data store that provides APIs for storing and sharing health and fitness data between Android apps. Before Health Connect, there was not a consistent way for developers to share data across Android apps. They had to integrate with many different APIs, each with a different set of data types and different permissions management frameworks.
Now, with Health Connect, there is less fragmentation. Health Connect provides a consistent set of 40+ data types and a single permissions management framework for users to control data permissions. This means that developers can share data with less effort, enabling people to access their health data in their favorite apps, and have more control over data permissions.
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Health Services is our API surface for accessing sensor data on Wear OS devices in a power-efficient way. Before Health Services, developers had to work directly with low-level sensors, which required different configurations on different devices, and was not battery-efficient.
With Health Services, there is now a consistent API surface across all Wear OS 3+ devices, allowing developers to write code once and run it across all devices. And, the Health Services architecture means that developers get great power savings in the process, allowing people to track longer workouts.
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Health Connect is currently available for download as an app on the Play Store. We are excited to announce that starting with the release of Android 14 later this year, Health Connect will be a core part of Android and available on all Android mobile devices. Users will be able to access Health Connect directly from Settings on their device, helping to control how their health data is shared across apps.
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Several new features will be shipped with the Health Connect Android 14 release. We’re adding a new exercise routes feature to allow users to share maps of their workouts through Health Connect. We’ve also made improvements to make it easier for people to log their menstrual cycles. And, Health Connect updates will be delivered through Google Play System Updates, which will allow new features to be updated often.
We’ve released several exciting changes to Health Services this year to support more use cases. Our new Batching Modes feature allows developers to adjust the data delivery frequency of heart rate data to support home gym use cases. We’ve also added new API capabilities, like golf shot detection.
The new version of Wear OS arrives later this year. Wear OS 4 will be the most performant yet, delivering improved battery life for the next generation of Wear OS watches. We will be releasing additional Health Services updates with this change, including improved background body sensor permissions.
There are over 50 apps already integrated with Health Connect and hundreds of apps with health services, including Peloton, Withings, Oura, and more. These apps are using Health Connect to incorporate new data, to give people an interconnected health experience, without building out many new API integrations. Learn more about how these health and fitness apps are creating new experiences for users in areas like sleep, exercise, nutrition, and more in our I/O technical session.
We also have over 100 apps integrated with Health Services. Apps using Health Services are seeing higher engagement from users with Wear apps, and are giving their users longer battery life in the process. For example, Strava found that users with their Wear app did 25% more activities than those without.
We hope many more developers will join us in bringing unique experiences within Android Health to your users this year.
If you’d like to create a more interconnected health experience for your users, we encourage you to integrate with Health Connect. And if you are a Wear developer, make sure you are using Health Services to get the best battery performance and future proofing for all upcoming Wear OS devices.
Check out our Health Services documentation, Health Connect documentation, and code samples to get started!
To learn more, watch the I/O session:
Posted by Sarat Tummala, Product Manager, Google Play services
Posted by Joseph Mills, Group Product Manager, Google Play
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Posted by Amanda Alexander, Product Manager, Android
Posted by Adarsh Fernando, Senior Product Manager, Android Studio