Google I/O 2022 Recap: Dev Tools & Jetpack

Ken Baldauf

Senior Software Engineer @ Acorns

Android Studio Dolphin Beta

• View Compose animations with animation preview
• Track Compose recomposition counts in layout inspector
• Can generate multiple Compose Previews at once with a custom defined annotation class
• Improved Wear OS emulator pairing & run configurations
• New Logcat V2: sports improved formatting & search
• Adds support for Gradle Managed Test Devices
  • Ability to define & manage virtual devices via Gradle
• Debug coroutines on API 29+ with coroutine-core 1.6.0+

Android Studio Electric Eel Canary

• Live Edit allows Compose Preview to update in real time
  • Experimental feature focussed on UI/UX code changes
  • No current support for new or method name changes
• Resizable emulators
  • test multiple screen sizes with a single emulator
• With API 33, you can now pair 2 emulators with virtual bluetooth
• Experimentally mirror physical device in Android Studio
• Integration with Google Play SDK Index
  • Provides insights into over 100 widely used SDKs
• View App Quality Insights from Firebase Crashlytics

Health Connect

• A platform built in collaboration with Samsung
• Unifies health data from multiple devices & apps
• Devs: single API for reading/writing health & fitness data
• Users: control over data access + secure on device storage
• Tracks activity, measurements, nutrition, sleep & vitals
• Samsung Health, Google Fit, Fitbit, MyFitnessPal, Leap Fitness & Withings are all onboard
• Will support API 28+ on device with Google Play Services
• androidx.health is currently available via a Jetpack Alpha

Jetpack Compose

• Compose 1.2 & Compose for Wear OS are both in Beta
• Adds support for android:includeFontPadding=false
• Downloadable font support
  • Async access Google Fonts & define fallback fonts
• Improves text magnifier added in Compose 1.1
• Define custom lazy layouts with experimental LazyLayout
• Insets move from Accompanist to Compose Foundation
• Navigation Component is now integrated into Compose 
• Material 3: window size classes
  • Opinionated breakpoints that categorize height/width
  • Balance simplicity with various device form factors

Jetpack: Room

• Room 2.4 - Stable
  • Stable support for Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP)
    • 2x compilation speed improvement of KAPT
  • Adds support for auto migrations
  • Built-in support for Paging 3.0
• Room 2.5 - Alpha
  • Start of a full Kotlin rewrite
    • Converted room-common, room-migration & paging from room-runtime

Jetpack: Macrobenchmark

• Measure app start-up & scrolling performance
• Version 1.1 has reach release candidate
  • Features improvements to testing speed
  • Can now be setup via Android Studio
  • Capture allocation counts & output results in IDE
  • Load traces in Android Studio for inspection
  • Generate custom Baseline Profiles
• Baseline Profiles: list of classes/methods included in APK
  • Android Runtime (ART) will use list to perform Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation
  • Faster launch times if AOT methods used in startup

Jetpack: JankStats

• metrics-performance: 1.0.0 Alpha
• Builds upon API 24's FrameMetrics; works on API 16+
• Helps track & analyze UI performance problems
  • Heuristic approach to pinpoint causes of frame drops
    • Determines when Jank occurs & ties it to the current UI & user state
  • Exposes OnFrameListener for per-frame reporting
    • Provides info on a frame's completion time, UI context & whether it was considered Jank
    • Encouraged to aggregate data for bulk logging

Jetpack: DragAndDrop

• Version 1.0.0 is a new Stable release; Supports API 24+
• Accept drag-and-drop from other apps or within the app
• Designed for split screen & new device form factors
• Adds a DropHelper utility class
  • Simplifies the implementation of drag & drop
  • Specify which views are drop targets
    • AppCompatEditText works on Android 7+ devices
    • All View on devices running Android 12+
  • Configure highlight that shows when user drags content over a target
  • Uses OnReceiveContentListener to handle ClipData

Jetpack: Misc

• Paging 3.1 Stable: adds support for Rx & Guava
• Tracing 1.1 Stable: enables profiling in non-debug builds 
  • Now API 14+; Previously only feasible on API 29+
• Annotation is migrating to Kotlin & adding highly requested annotations
• • Ex: @DeprecatedSince inspired by @RequiresApi
• AppCompat 1.6 Alpha: backports Android 13's per-app language settings to API 14
• Launched series of Modern Android Development Skills  videos focussed on Jetpack's Architecture components
•  Over 100 projects now on GitHub

Flutter

• Launch of Flutter 3
  • Coincides with Dart 2.17
• Now fully native on Apple Silicon for development
• Completes change from mobile-centric to multiplatform
  • Adds stable support for macOS & Linux
    • Supports both Intel & Apple Silicon for macOS with Universal Binary
  • Supports Android, iOS, Web, Windows, macOS + Linux