Android Developers Backstage

Mads, Chet and Tor

In this episode, Chet and Tor talk with Mads Ager from the Android Studio compilers team. We cover a number of subjects, from r8 and d8 optimizations and resource shrinking to work on the Kotlin compiler front- and back-end, as well as the new Kotlin symbol processor.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Mads: @madsager
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Tor, Romain, Sara, Philip, and a little tiny Chet top-right

In this episode, Tor, Chet, and Romain talk with Sara N-Marandi and Philip Moltmann from the Android framework team about some of the new permissions changes in Android 11. We talk about why these changes were made, how to use them correctly in your code, and how things actually work on the inside.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Hoi and Matej in the top row, Chet and Tor below

In this episode, Chet and Tor talk with Hoi Lam and Matej Pfajfar about machine learning on Android. Tune in to learn about ML Kit, TensorFlow Lite, transfer learning, federated learning, ML model binding, the Android Neural Networks API, and more!

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Hoi: @hoitab
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Romain, Tor's large head and bad framing, Chet's little tiny picture top-right, Julia, and Stefan

It's all about people! In this episode, Tor, Chet and Romain are joined by Julia  Reynolds and Stefan Franks from the System UI team to have a discussion about conversations. We also converse about things unrelated to conversations.

Starting with Android 11, conversation notifications now appear in a dedicated space at the top of the notifications shade. These notifications come with specific actions like opening a bubble or setting a reminder. Tune in to learn more about this new people-forward design.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Android 11 Beta
Notifications

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Artur, Chet, Mady, Romain and Tor

In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor talked with Mady Melor  and Artur Tsurkan from the System UI team about... Bubbles!

Bubbles let users easily multi-task from anywhere on their device, and facilitates real-time communication using a chat application.

Tune in to learn more about this new API in Android 11!


Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/bubbles

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Romain, Chet, Alan, Nick, and a little tiny Tor in the upper-right corner

In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor talked with Nick Anthony and Alan Viverette from the AndroidX team about... AndroidX. And Jetpack. And androidx. (Spoiler alert: androidx is the set of libraries. Jetpack is that... plus opinionated guidance. AndroidX is the name of the team that ships this stuff).

We also talked about the release cadence (currently every two weeks, up from every-several-months a couple of years ago), the standards for release naming/versioning, API standards, and everything else in the world of AndroidX infrastructure and release.



Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

AndroidX releases

Alan: /u/alanviverette
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Chet, Romain, Jorim, Adrian and Taran. Oh and Tor hiding the upper  right.

In this episode, Tor, Chet and Romain are joined by Jorim, Adrian and Taran from the Window Manager team. We discussed newly announced capabilities of the IME (Input Method Editor) in Android  11. These new APIs allow applications to react in real-time to IME animations and thus provide a more polished and seamless user experience. It also happens to be the answer to one of your most requested features: knowing when the on-screen keyboard is showing.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Chet, Qasid, Romain, Sally, Tor, and a very mysterious guest in a very dark room in the lower-right.

In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor talked (remotely!) with Sally Yuen and Qasid Sadiq from the Accessibility team. We discussed the kinds of tools and facilities that their team provides, and how developers can (and should!) make their applications more accessible. We talked about Accessibility Services, Talkback, Accessibility Scanner, organizational complexities of accessibility efforts, and more.

Pro tip: Avoid creating custom widgets by using the built-in widgets in the platform to inherit accessibility functionality for free.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Build more accessible apps: Guide with videos and links to more resources.

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Tor, Chet, and Romain, remembering the way things used to be, back when there was a recording studio instead of closets at home.

In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor chat with zero guests about the current work-from-home reality, and about adjustments we've all made as we change the way we work.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Tor, Don, Chet, and Phil, on a video conference on Tor's machine. VCs are critical to mitigating (but not actually solving) latency issues with remote podcasts.

In this first ever full-remote episode, Tor and Chet discuss audio programming with Don Turner from the Android DevRel team, and Phil Burk from the Android Audio Framework team. They chat about Oboe, low-latency audio, audio performance in general, etc. And because Don and Phil know everything about audio, more time was spent before the recording discussing how to properly record the episode than was spent actually recording the episode.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Phil: @philburk
Don: @donturner
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Rahul (Work), Sumir (Manager), and Chet

In this episode, Chet talks with Sumir Kataria and Rahul Ravikumar from the Android Toolkit team about Work Manager! Tune in to learn about work manager, an AndroidX library for deferrable background work, and recent changes such as on demand initialization, new lint checks, and more!

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

• Working with WorkManager, from the 2018 Android Dev Summit
• WorkManager: Beyond the basics, from the 2019 Android Dev Summit

Releases & Bugs:

Sumir: @SumirKodes
Rahul: @tikurahul
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Kweku, Makoto, Amith, Chet, Romain, and Tor

In this episode, Chet talked with Amith Yamasani, Makoto Onuki, and Kweku Adams from the framework team about power management. We waxed poetic about the heuristics the system uses to kill tasks, doze mode and how the system tries to save battery, TrimMemory requests, JobScheduler (the underlying platform facility used by WorkManager), AppStandby buckets, and more.

Favorite word: OOMAdjust (Out of Memory Adjustment, but I far prefer the abbreviation)

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Mike, Romain, Yigit, and Chet

In this episode, Chet and Romain talk with Yigit Boyar, from the Jetpack team, and Mike Nakhimovich from Dropbox. Mike and Yigit have been working on an Open Source library called Store. Store helps with the fetching, caching, storing and sharing of data in your application. Both Yigit and Mike used this opportunity to teach Chet and Romain about the repository pattern, how Store works, what makes building a library like Store challenging and much more.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:
Mike: @friendlymikhail
Yigit: @ yigitboyar
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Adam, Romain, Tor, and Chet, on location in the fancy and totally upscale ADB recording studio

In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk with Adam Powell from the UI Toolkit team about Jetpack Compose. The conversation meandered into declarative programming, reacting to state changes, data flowing through an application, and Kotlin domain-specific languages.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:

Adam: @adampwp
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Tor, Nicolas, John, Romain and Chet in the Android Studio

In this episode, Tor, Romain and Chet chit chat with Nicolas Roard and John Hoford from the Android Studio team about Motion Layout -- and ConstraintLayout and visual editing in the IDE.

In the recording session they also promised to release ConstraintLayout 2.0 beta 4 before the podcast was released. And they achieved that: https://androidstudio.googleblog.com/2019/12/constraintlayout-200-beta-4.html.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:

Nicolas: @camaelon
John: @johnhoford
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Michael, Chet and Romain in the cozy London recording studio.

In this episode, Chet and Romain travel all the way to London to have a chat with Michael Wright. This is not Michael's first time on the podcast and one again the discussion is about displays, input devices and haptics.

If you want to learn more about high refresh rate displays (90/120 Hz), HDR, audio-coupled haptics, how gamepads are supported and, curiously, about the Android API council, you found the right episode!

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Chet: @chethaase

We forgot to take a picture of ourselves when we recorded this. Please use your imagination.

In this episode, Chet and Florina Muntenescu (from the Android Developer Relations team) talk with Dom Elliott from the Google Play team about Android App Bundles and other Google Play features.

App bundles are the new packaging format for Android apps. They allow you to upload a single version of your app, then Google Play can distribute optimized versions of that app to users, depending on device-specific capabilities, like the selected locale(s) on the device.

We also talked about other recent Google Play features (related to bundles and not), such as on-demand delivery and in-app updates.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:
App bundles samples
On-Demand modules codelab
Plaid sample
Build a Modular Android App Architecture (Google I/O 2019)

Tor, Jerome, Chris and Xavier in the recording studio.

In this episode, Tor chats with Jerome Dochez, Chris Warrington and Xavier Ducrohet from the Android Studio build system team.

We discuss a lot of topics -- the new speed attribution feature in 4.0, the effort to create new APIs for plugin authors, and a lot more.


Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.


Jerome: @dochez
Xav: @droidxav
Tor: @tornorbye
Chet: @chethaase
Romain: @romainguy
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Allen, Chris, Adam, part of Tor, Dan (taking the photo), and Chet. All of them are also in the monitor, but backwards. Oh, and note the gym sock being used to dampen noise on the mic. High tech stuff, ADB.

In this episode, Chet and Tor talk with Chris Banes, Adam Cohen, Dan Sandler, and Allen Huang about Gesture Navigation.

Gesture Nav is an important UI behavior change in the Android 10 release that developers should handle and test. Chris has written Gesture Nav articles recently. This conversation goes further into the background and reasons for the change, as well as techniques for dealing with it.

Note: The audio in this episode, is not up to the usual quality bar. We had the choice between recording the conversation with a non-ideal setup or not doing it at all. We chose content over quality.


Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:

Gesture Navigation: Going edge-to-edge (I)
Gesture Navigation: Handling visual overlaps (II)
Gesture Navigation: Handling gesture conflicts (III)
Gesture Navigation: Immersive Modes (IV)

Chris: @chrisbanes
Dan: @dsandler
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Chet, Tor, Romain, Cyril and Zarah, laughing at something stupid funny that Chet said.

Amongst the many talks and announcements at the Android Dev Summit 2019 was a hidden gem: the first ever live episode of this podcast!

Chet, Romain and Tor took this opportunity to have a chat with Zarah Dominguez and Cyril Mottier. Both Zarah and Cyril work as Android app developers and are known for their presentations at various Android conferences.

We talked about modernizing large codebases, Kotlin, data binding, themes & styles, and many other things. Let's not spoil the podcast here.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:

ADB Live on YouTube
Zarah: @zarahjutz (blog)
Cyril: @cyrilmottier (blog)
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.