Android Developers Backstage

In this episode we chat with Derek and Brian from the Skia team about Skia, pixel shaders, and the new “AGSL” API that lets you provide pixel shaders for advanced graphics effects, which was recently added to the preview release of Android T.

If you’re interested in graphics technology, this is the episode for you. 

If you’re not interested in graphics... you should be.

Brian, Romain Derek
Chet, Tor

Links:

• Skia's SkSL/AGSL playground & debugger → https://goo.gle/3DHFJYm 
• Skia's SkSL documentation → https://goo.gle/3uZK0CA 

Brian: @BrianOsman

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode we chat with Rahul and Leland from the Android toolkit team about "baseline profiles", a new mechanism which lets applications ship with profiling metadata used at application install time to make it start faster. We discuss how this is used in Jetpack Compose, cloud profiles in general, and more.

Chet, Romain, Rahul, Leland and Tor

Links:

• Baseline Profile DAC Documentation 
• Android Developers Blog Post on baseline profiles
• Jetpack Macrobenchmarking Library

Rahul: @tikurahul

Leland: @intelligibabble

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode, Clara (Android Toolkit), Florina (Android Developer Relations), and Daniel (Android Product Management) join your usual hosts to talk about large screens, what they are and what they mean for app developers. You will also learn about the resources at your disposal to build high quality experiences on large screen devices: from samples and guidance to canonical layouts and new APIs such as window size classes

Romain, Clara, Florina, Daniel, Chet, and Tor

Links:

• Large screens documentation
• Material adaptive design docs
• ADS talk: Build Android UIs for any screen size
• Codelab: Support foldable and dual-screen devices with Jetpack WindowManager
• Samples
• • Jetnews: Responsive UI implementation with Compose
  • Jetcaster: Tabletop support implementation with Compose
  • Google I/O Android App: Responsive UI implementation with Views
  • Trackr: Responsive UI implementation with Views

Clara: @clarabayarri

Daniel: @pmatgoog

Florina: @FMuntenescu

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode, we chat with Yigit Boyar (again!) from the Android Toolkit Team and Manuel Vivo from the Developer Relations team about application architecture. The team has released new architecture guidance, and we talk about that guidance here, as well as how our architecture recommendations apply in the new Jetpack Compose world.

Yigit, Tor, Manuel, and Chet. Romain was AWOL.

Check out the revamped and enhanced Guide to app architecture.

Yigit: @yigitboyar

Manuel: @manuelvicnt

Romain: @romainguy

Chet: @chethaase

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode, we chat with Yigit Boyar from the Android Toolkit Team about Kotlin multi platform, while Romain provides light background music on his piano.

Yigit: @yigitboyar

Romain: @romainguy

Chet: @chethaase

Tor: @tornorbye

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

In this episode, Chet and Romain talked with Nicole McWilliams and Petr Čermák from the London engineering office about their work on App Widgets and Digital Wellbeing.

Romain: @romainguy

Chet: @chethaase

Tor: @tornorbye

Nicole: ​​@nicolelaure

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

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor sit down to chat about the Android DevSummit, and in particular all the new features arriving in Android Studio, along with a few other topics like Chet's new jank stats library, the Android 12L release, and more.

Top row: Chet and Tor. Bottom row: Romain.

The Android Studio talk discussed is https://goo.gle/3caaFDT 

In this episode, Bart Wronski takes Tor, Romain, and Chet through the camera pipeline that powers the Pixel phones. We talked about how cameras capture images, and how the algorithms responsible for Pixel’s beautiful images work. If you’ve ever wondered how HDR+ or Night Sight works, this episode if for you!

Top row: Tor and Bart. Bottom row: Chet and Romain.

Links:

• Bart’s blog on graphics and image processing
• SIGGRAPH paper and presentation on handheld multi-frame super resolution
• Night Sight
• Astrophotography with Night Sight
• HDR+ with bracketing on Pixel
• Live HDR+ on Pixel 4 (HDRnet)

Bart: @bartwronsk

Romain: @romainguy

Chet: @chethaase

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor have a chat with Selim, Vadim and Lucas from the Android system UI team, discussing many of the new features in Android 12's user interface.

Top row: Vadim, Selim and Romain. Bottom row: Lucas, Tor and Chet.

Some relevant links for the Splash screen discussion:

https://goo.gle/3APByre 

https://goo.gle/3zGDVeB 

Selim: @selimcinek

Vadim: @vadimcaen

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor have a chat with Gabriel Peal from Tonal, well known for his contributions to the Android community on projects such as Mavericks and Lottie. We talked about Lottie and how it helps designers and developers deliver more delightful user experiences by taking complex animations designed in specialized authoring tools such as After Effects, and rendering them efficiently on mobile devices. We also explored the challenges of designing and implementing a rendering engine such as Lottie.

Romain, Gabriel, Tor, and Chet

Related info:

• Lottie
• LottieFiles
• Mavericks

Gabriel: @gpeal8

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode, Tor and Nick are joined by Chris Sinco, Diego Perez and Nicolas Roard to discuss the features added to Android Studio for Jetpack Compose. They discuss the Compose preview, interactive preview, animation inspector and additions to the Layout inspector and their approach to create tooling to support the Compose’s code-centric approach.

Diego, Tor, Chris, Nicolas and Nick tooling around.

Tooling guide

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor talk with Chris Craik and Rahul Ravikumar from the toolkit performance team. We talk about the recently released the macrobenchmark tool+library, in addition to other interesting bits like how the benchmark libraries work, how to use them, how they relate to system tracing, how to do performance debugging in general, and even a teaser of future performance instrumentation functionality that the team is working on.

Chet, Chris, Rahul (top), Romain, and Tor (bottom), all looking unusually happy.

Related info:

• The Profile your app performance page for an overview of the performance tools and practices we offer.
• Performance samples
• Running benchmarks in continuous integration

Chris: @chris_craik

Rahul: @tikurahul

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor talk with Sara N Marandi, Fred Chung and Erik Wolsheimer about the new privacy features in Android 12, such as the privacy dashboard, and the camera and microphone usage indicators.

Guests Eric, Sara and Fred on the top row, and hosts Romain, Tor and Chet on the bottom row.

• Permission best practices → https://goo.gle/3oVdK02 
• Android 12 privacy changes → https://goo.gle/2VvmtMl 

Sara: @snmarandi

Fred: @fredchung

Eric

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode, Nick and Romain are joined by Filip Pavlis, Jelle Fresen & Jose Alcérreca to talk about Testing in Compose. They discuss how Compose’s testing APIs were developed hand-in-hand with the UI toolkit, making them more deterministic and opening up new possibilities like manipulating time. They go on to discuss the semantics tree, interop testing, screenshot testing and the possibilities for host-side testing.

Compose Testing Cheatsheet

Compose Testing codelab

Sample Tests: Jetnews, Jetchat, Crane, Rally

Screenshot Testing

Compose Learning Pathway

Romain: @romainguy

Filip Pavlis

Jelle Fresen

Jose: @ppvi

Nick: @crafty

In this episode Nick and Chet are joined by Dois Liu and Nader Jawad to discuss Compose’s Animation and Graphics systems. They cover their goals to make both systems easier to understand, more consistent and simpler to work with. They explain how they adapted traditionally imperative systems to a declarative world and give an overview of both the high level composables the library offers as well as lower level building blocks you can drop down to for more control.

Hosts Chet & Nick speak to Doris and Nader.

Compose Graphics guide

Compose Animation guide

Compose Animation codelab

AnimatedContent composable

AdvanceTimeBy (testing animations)

Compose Learning Pathway

Chet: @chethaase

Doris: @doris4lt

Nader: @nadewad

Nick: @crafty

In this episode, Romain and Tor are joined by Adarsh Fernando, Arif Sukoco and Yahan Zhou from the Android Studio team, covering the recent improvements to support for testing. This includes automated test snapshots, where the emulator captures a snapshot for a failing test you can then load and analyze later, it includes the Test Matrix tool where the IDE shows a matrix of tests and the devices they're running on, as well as a unified Gradle test runner, and Gradle managed virtual devices, and more.

Android Studio Bumblebee: Android Testing

Adarsh Fernando

Arif Sukoco

Yahan Zhou

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

In our ongoing mini-series on Jetpack Compose, Nick and Romain talk to Clara Bayarri and Matvei Malkov about Compose’s support for Material Design. They discuss how Compose supports Material Components and Material Theming out of the box, how you can customize these to your needs or how Compose makes it easier to build your own design system. They also share insights into building reusable components with slot APIs and when to use CompositionLocals and look to the future with Compose’s planned support for Material You.

Hosts Romain and Nick with Clara and Matvei.

Material components reference docs

Compose Theming guide

Compose Theming codelab

Build beautiful Material Design apps with Jetpack Compose Google I/O talk

Compose Learning Pathway

Clara: @clarabayarri

Matvei: @matvei_jj

Romain: @romainguy

Nick: @crafty

In this second episode of our mini-series on Jetpack Compose (AD/BC) Nick and Romain are joined by Anastasia Soboleva, George Mount and Mihai Popa to talk about Compose’s layout system. They explain how the Compose layout model works and its benefits, introduce common layout composables, discuss how writing your own layout is far simpler than Views and how you can even animate layout.

Hosts Romain and Nick are joined by Anastasia, George and Mihai and producers Daniel and Jessica 👋

Compose Layouts guide

Compose Layouts codelab

Layout composable

Layout modifier

Foundation Layouts & Modifiers (Row, Column, Box etc)

Intrinsic size example

Compose Learning Pathway

Anastasia: @nastia_05

George: @georgemount1

Mihai: @mihaipopa12

Romain: @romainguy

Nick: @crafty

In this episode, Chad and Jeff from the Android Security team join Tor and Romain to talk about… security. Chad and Jeff explain what the platform does to help preserve user trust and device integrity, why it sometimes means restricting existing APIs, and touch on what apps can do or should worry about.

App security best practices

Security tips

Security with HTTPS and SSL

Chad: @chadbrubaker__

Jeff: @jeffvanderstoep

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

In this episode, Chet and Romain welcome Hunter and Nick from the Material Design team. Material Design was originally introduced when Android 5.0 came out and has come a long way since then. Our guests will give you an overview of some of the recent additions and improvements to the Material Design Component libraries: transitions, motion theming, Compose, large screens support and guidance, etc.

Material Design website

Material You

What’s new with Material at I/O

Material Design Components for Android

Material Motion with MDC

Hunter: @hunter_stich

Nick: @ricknout

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy