Episode 137: Accessibility

In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk about one of Tor’s favorite topics: Lint! Specifically, we talk about Lint checks and the annotations that use them to enable better, more robust, and more self-documenting APIs.
Lint: It’s not just for pockets anymore.

Chapters:

Intro (00:00)

Lint checks for annotations (01:50)

Lint checks in Android (05:38)

Logic checks (07:34)

Color representations (10:01)

How does lint know the type of integer? (14:40)

Kotlin annotations (17:19)

Unsigned (20:10)

HalfFloat (22:25)

Thread annotations (25:12)

@CallSuper (28:18)

LayoutOpt (30:26)

Lint checks in AndroidX (32:00)

Restrict to annotation (36:45)

Writing your own custom Lint checks (39:51)

Lint testing framework (43:26)

Kotlin buildList Lint check example (45:25)

@Discouraged (48:15)

Wrap up (50:08)

@Deprecated Chet (50:50)

Romain: @romainguy, threads.net/@romainguy, romainguy@androiddev.social

Tor: threads.net/@tor.norbye and tornorbye@androiddev.social

Chet: @chethaase, threads.net/@chet.haase, and chethaase@androiddev.social

Catch videos on YouTube → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast  

Subscribe to Android Developers  → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs 

In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk about some of the many things that happened this year in the world of Android development, including new devices and form factors, tool improvements, AndroidX features and libraries, and Jetpack Compose releases. And any tech podcast would be remiss without mentioning AI/ML, so we talk about that too.

Tor, Romain and Chet

Chapters:

Intro (00:00)

Google engineers vs Android (00:57)

Big changes of 2023 intro (3:03)

AI (3:38)

Programming with AI (5:08)

Writing with AI (8:52)

New devices from Android - Pixel fold (12:31)

Pixel watch (18:50)

Bard (19:37)

Changes in device release times (20:23)

Major changes in devices vs incremental updates (21:42)

Camera (22:40)

Platform developments - mainline modules (24:03)

More testing for Android (25:12)

Flaky tests (26:55)

Jetpack compose features (32:32)

RTO (38:00)

Shapes library and KMP (42:42)

Final thoughts on big events of 2023 (45:03)

Studio build improvements (46:43)

Baseline profiles (49:21)

Listener mail (50:45)

Where has Chet been? (52:46)

Metalava question (55:46)

Wrap up wrap up (57:00)

Romain: @romainguy, threads.net/@romainguy, romainguy@androiddev.social

Tor: threads.net/@tor.norbye and tornorbye@androiddev.social

Chet: @chethaase, threads.net/@chet.haase, and chethaase@androiddev.social

Catch videos on YouTube → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast  

Subscribe to Android Developers  → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

In this episode, Tor and Romain chat with Aurimas Liutikas from the AndroidX team. Topics include performance tuning the AndroidX Gradle builds using configuration caching, local caching and remote caching, as well as tracking API compatibility using the Metalava tool.

Aurimas, Romain and Tor

Romain: @romainguy, threads.net/@romainguy, romainguy@androiddev.social

Tor: threads.net/@tor.norbye and tornorbye@androiddev.social

Aurimas: androiddev.social/@Aurimas and www.liutikas.net/blog-posts

Catch videos on YouTube → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast   

Subscribe to Android Developers  → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs  

In this episode, Tor and Romain chat with Greg Baker and Joe Baker-Malone about exciting new Android Studio features made possible by Firebase integration. Physical device streaming allows you to connect remotely to physical devices hosted in Google’s secure data centers and use them for all your development needs. We also explore other time saving features like the ability to go from a crash report directly to the correct line of code, even across git branches.

Tor, Romain, Joe, Greg

Links:

• Android Device Streaming from Android Studio feedback form

• App Quality Insights and Firebase Crashlytics

Romain: @romainguy, romainguy@threads, romainguy@androiddev.social

Tor: tor.norbye@threads and tornorbye@androiddev.social

Greg: @bakergo@fosstodon.org

In this episode, Chet and Romain speak with Ken Russell and Corentin Wallez from the WebGPU team. WebGPU is a new API that brings modern GPU rendering and compute functionality to web and other platforms (including Android!). We talk about the genesis and capabilities of WebGPU, WGSL (WebGPU’s new shading language), the state of WebGL (the predecessor API for web GPU rendering), and lots of other fun related graphics topics.

Ken, Romain, and Chet (not pictured: Corentin, who is on the monitor behind the photographer)

Links:

• Samples (and its github repo)  

• Google I/O Codelab

• Google I/O presentation Introducing WebGPU (and associated blog post)

• Series of articles teaching WebGPU and WGSL

• Series of articles of WebGPU Best Practices

• Draft specs for WebGPU and WGSL

• Dawn from Google/Chromium

• wgpu from Firefox

Romain: @romainguy, romainguy@threads, romainguy@androiddev.social

Tor: tor.norbye@threads and tornorbye@androiddev.social

Chet: @chethaase, chet.haase@threads, and chethaase@androiddev.social

Ken: @gfxprogrammer
Corentin: @DaKangz and @DaKangz@mastodon.gamedev.place

Catch more from ADB → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast
Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs 

This time, Romain, Tor, and Chet talk with Leland Richardson, George Mount, and Chuck Jazdzewski from the Jetpack Compose team about performance. The team has been looking at performance issues recently and discusses what they’ve found, what gotchas lie in wait for library developers, what tools and compilers can magically handle for you... and what they can’t. Tune in to learn about why we worry about autoboxing (and why you probably shouldn’t).

Foreground: Romain, Tor, George, and Chuck
Background (on the monitor): Chet, Leland, and Cody (audio engineer/producer), plus another view of the Studio with Romain, Tor, George and Chuck again, for your recursive pleasure.

Links:

• Jetpack Compose

• Android Studio Memory Profiler

• Macrobenchmark

• Baseline profiles 

• Kotlin bytecode decompilation

Romain: @romainguy and romainguy@androiddev.social

Tor: tor.norbye@threads and tornorbye@androiddev.social

Chet: @chethaase and chethaase@androiddev.social

Leland: @intelligibabble

George: @georgemount1

Chuck: @chuckjaz

Catch ADB on YouTube → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast  

Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs 

Since our original episode on location nearly nine years ago, a lot has happened in the location support for Android. In this episode, Wyatt Riley and Roy Want answer all of Tor's questions about how it works and cover recent developments like indoor location, elevation, and some tips for developers.

Wyatt, Roy and Tor.

Links:

• Getting started guide

• Precise indoor location

• Wi-Fi Alliance(WFA) : Wi-Fi Location(TM) demonstrated at a recent WFA member event

• Android Developer resources for Wi-Fi RTT (IEEE 802.11mc) Location

• Google Play Store has three apps that demonstrate Wi-Fi RTT (IEEE 802.11mc) capabilities for devices with 11mc support.

• WifitRttLocator (phone positioning in a building with 11mc capable Access Points)

• WifiRttScan (Phone to Access Point ranging)

WifiNanScan (Phone to phone ranging)

Catch ADB on YouTube→ https://goo.gle/adb-podcast 

Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

You saw it at Google I/O - now you can hear about it in the comfort of your own headphones! Tor, Romain, and Chet talk with Siva Velusamy and Sandhya Mohan from the Android Studio team about the just-launched Studio Bot. This new AI-powered assistant enables conversational queries in the IDE to help with coding, commenting, confusion, or if you just need a friend.

Chet, Tor, Romain, Sandhy, and Siva in the Sunnyvale studio

Studio Bot: https://goo.gle/3BBEKZI 

Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs 

Raluca Sauciuc joins Tor and Romain to talk about what goes on behind the scenes in Android Studio. Raluca takes us through the tools and workflows used by the Android Studio team to improve performance and memory usage, and avoid future regressions. She also explains how the team adopts new versions of the IntelliJ IDE and platform, and how they can deal with massive code merges.

Raluca, Romain, and Tor

Romain: @romainguy and romainguy@androiddev.social

Tor: @tornorbye and tornorbye@androiddev.social

Chet: @chethaase and chethaase@androiddev.social

Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs 

Chet and Romain talk to Jeff Hamilton and Anton Hansson from the Mainline team about "modular system components", and the new SDK extension framework which lets developers access them. 

Anton Hansson top right, and Jeff Hamilton bottom left, with Romain and Chet

• Blog post: https://goo.gle/3S1c3g4 

• AndroidX convenience constants, e.g. T_EXTENSION_INT: https://goo.gle/3lEJwRx 

Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs