This was my first time attending Android Dev Summit in person. It was great to come to California and reconnect with many of my Android friends. I put together a few highlights below.
The star of the show for me was Jetpack Compose. Compose aims to simplify and accelerate UI development on Android. It offers a declarative design pattern similar to Flutter, which appeals to me. I’m honestly really excited to see how things develop.
I attended the Compose codelab and got to pepper Florina Muntenescu, Android Developer Advocate, with all of my questions. I was able to get a sample app up and running relatively quickly. I’m going to explore creating a more substantial app that borrows heavily from the Flutter BLoC pattern. Let’s see how it goes.
The Future of Android
I came to the Summit with one main question in mind, what is the future of Android? Or put another way, what is the unique value proposition of developing for native?
#AskAndroid: What would you say is the unique value proposition of developing for native Android versus something like Flutter, Kotlin MPP, or Progressive Web Apps? Thanks!#AndroidDevSummit
— Annyce Davis (@brwngrldev) October 23, 2019
Turns out, I wasn’t the only person who’s been thinking about this. During the keynote, the Android team covered the five areas that will be the focus of Android for the next several years. TL;DR there is much more ahead.
Here’s the breakdown:
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Helpful innovation
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Emergency location services
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Detecting if you’re in a car crash on Pixel 4 devices
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Hardware advancements – foldable glass, dynamic displays
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App continuity
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Updatability
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Making sure customers continue to get timely updates
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Project Treble reduces the cost of updates
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Quarterly security updates are sent out to devices that came out since 2018
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Google Play system updates, created a new packaging format APEX
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Security
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Google Play Protect has anti-malware support
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2.5 million dollars is the current bug bounty for Android OS
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Privacy
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Android 10 added over 50 features related to privacy
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Scoped storage
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Great developer experiences
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Modern android development – Jetpack components
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Kotlin – preferred development language
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Jetpack Compose – designed for the next 10 years
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Takeaways
During the Summit I attended a number of sessions. The key takeaway for me is that the Android team is thinking a lot about developer productivity. The updates to Android Stuido, Gradle build improvements, and Jetpack Compose will all lead to increased productivity.
The announcement about upcoming improvements to Dagger was highly appreciated. Dependency injection on Android is a constant source of frustration and debate. Knowing that there is an official recommended approach is reassuring. I look forward to incorporating these enhancements in my own apps.
I also spent time speaking with fellow Android developers. It’s illuminating to hear their perspectives on the future of Android. As well as, to hear more about how they’re approaching development challenges in their respective companies.
Ultimately, the wisest course to take revolves around understanding the problem that needs to be solved and the people who are available to solve it. I’m glad that I was able to attend. I continue to be appreciative of this wonderful community. ❤️
