Three Major Updates in Modern Android Development | Highlights from 2022 I/O

Author / Nick Butcher, Developer Relations Engineer

Our goal is to enable developers to build beautiful and attractive Android applications as quickly and easily as possible. We aim to handle the complex parts of the application building process, allowing developers to focus on functionality and provide a high-quality user experience.

We refer to our investments in these areas as Modern Android Development (MAD), which includes a series of tools, libraries, and guidelines recommended by the Android team. At this year’s I/O conference, we released some updates about MAD, and now let’s take a look back:

△ Three Major Updates in Modern Android Development

#1 Compose 1.2 Beta

Jetpack Compose 1.2 has released its first Beta version, meaning that existing APIs and methods will not change in the official version. We will continue to build the Compose product roadmap, providing the APIs you need to support more advanced use cases, such as downloadable fonts, LazyGrid, window insets, nested scrolling interactions, and support for richer tools, such as LiveEdit, recomposition counts in the layout inspector, and animation previews. You can also learn how developers from applications like Airbnb use Jetpack Compose to improve efficiency, and see other new features in Compose.

• Compose Product Roadmap
  https://developer.android.google.cn/jetpack/androidx/compose-roadmap
• Tools
  https://developer.android.google.cn/studio/preview/features#new_in_compose
• Airbnb
  https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/05/airbnb-uses-jetpack-compose.html

#2 Baseline Profiles

You can embed configurations in baseline profiles to guide the Android runtime in recognizing which code paths should be precompiled rather than interpreted, which can have a significant impact on critical user experiences like application startup. This is especially important when using unbundled libraries like Jetpack Compose, as platform code optimizations cannot affect these libraries.

• Baseline Profiles
  https://developer.android.google.cn/topic/performance/baselineprofiles

Many Jetpack libraries (including Jetpack Compose) come with baseline profiles, but you need to know how to add these profiles to your own applications and libraries to enhance performance. Just adding baseline profiles without modifying any code can yield up to 40% faster application startup speed!

#3 Live Edit

With the Live Edit feature, you can edit composables in real-time in Compose Preview, on physical devices, or in the emulator and see the corresponding modifications for rapid iteration. “Live Edit” is an optional experimental feature in Android Studio Electric Eel, which has certain limitations. We welcome you to try this feature and share your feedback.

• Live Edit
  https://developer.android.google.cn/studio/run#live-edit
• Android Studio Electric Eel
  https://developer.android.google.cn/studio/preview
• Optional Experimental Feature
  https://developer.android.google.cn/studio/run#live-edit-quickstart
• Limitations
  https://developer.android.google.cn/studio/run#limitations
• Feedback
  https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/new?component=192708&template=840533

The above content highlights the three major releases regarding Modern Android Development at the Google I/O conference. For more exciting content from I/O, please watch the complete video playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWz5rJ2EKKc-onbAvzvqFajkgcYixR249

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