Now in Android #6

Stable AndroidX libs, Droidcon NY videos, ADS happenings, gesture navigation, and accessibility doc enhancements

Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.

AndroidX: New Stable and Beta Releases

Several AndroidX libraries went stable recently. If you’re a “don’t talk to me until they’re done!” kind of developer, it’s a good time to check these out.

Room 2.2.0 This release has a few things that developers have been asking for:

Pre-packaged database. You can now ship a pre-populated database in your apk resources or load one from a file. Florina Muntenescu discussed this feature in an article a few weeks ago.

Better relations: SQLite could deal with many-to-many relations, but Room? Not so much… until now.

Flow: To complete the use of coroutines started in a previous release, Room added support for Flow<T> as a DAO return type.

Faster builds (Oh, is that something you wanted?): Room can now take advantage of incremental builds for annotation processors. It’s not enabled by default yet, but you can enable it by following these instructions in your build to speed things up until it is the default.

Transition 1.2.0

This is an important update if you target API level 29. Some of the changes made in Android 10 for Non-SDK Interfaces (restricting usage of non-public APIs) affected some of the methods that the Transition library was reflecting on. The library updated to use the new, approved public methods, so update to this version if/when you need it.

Also reaching stable are Loader 1.1.0, Media2 1.0.1, and Concurrent Futures 1.0.0.

Several libraries also hit beta recently. If you avoid alpha releases (while the API is still in flux) but want to check things out before they’re done and stable, this could be a good time to tune into these Activity 1.1.0, Benchmark 1.0.0, Core 1.2.0, Fragment 1.2.0, Lifecycle 2.2.0, Lifecycle ViewModel-Savedstate 1.0.0, Navigation 2.2.0, and Transition 1.3.0.

Droidcon New York: The Videos!

One of the best things about speaking at conferences is meeting all of the developers and hearing about their experiences development for Android. But for the people that we don’t happen to talk to…

One of the other best things about speaking at conferences is getting the content out there to developers. It takes a bunch of time to create the materials for a talk, figuring out how to explain complicated technical things using only slides, words, and demos, so being able to connect with people in the room to present the content is great. But for the people that couldn’t be in the room, or couldn’t make it to the conference…

One of the other other best things about speaking at conferences is having the talks recorded, so that all of that content can be shared with everyone.

The videos from Droidcon New York were posted recently. You can now watch all of the presentations in the comfort of your own wherever-you-are-right-now. It’s almost like being at the conference; just pretend that the person next to you is typing on their laptop and the person in front of you is on their phone, checking Twitter, then Email, then Slack, then Twitter, then Email, then Slack….

Android Dev Summit for Everyone!

For everyone that can’t make it to ADS, there are still many ways to tune into the event.

#AskAndroid

You can tweet questions at us to be answered during the livestream. Here’s Lyla Fujiwara to tell you more about it.

Livestream

All of the Android Dev Summit sessions will be recorded and posted to YouTube after the event. Many of the sessions will also be live-streamed. So grab some popcorn or the grain/salt/sugar/fat/taste snack of your choice, sit back, and watch the content as it unfolds before you. There will also be other content created specially for the livestream (because isn’t it a drag when an event takes breaks between sessions and the livestream does too?) , such as #AskAndroid (see above).

Go to the Android Developers YouTube channel to watch the livestream during the event. And go back there later to watch the recordings as they get posted. And then go back there later again to catch the stuff you missed the first two times.

Get the App

If you want to track the content at the event, be sure to install the Android Dev Summit 2019 app on the Play Store.

In addition to the fully installed app, you can also try the Google Play Instant version, which you can get (quickly!) by navigating on your phone to either d.android.com/dev-summit or to the Play Store and clicking on the Try now button.

Gestures of Goodwill

Chris Banes has published two more articles (III and IV) to help explain how to deal with some of the changes in Android 10.

Gesture Navigation: Handling gesture conflicts (III) covers situations where applications have interactive UI elements near the edges of the screen. The article explains how to know whether your app will have problems to fix, as well as how to fix them.

Gesture Navigation: Immersive Modes (IV) covers what to do when applications need to go into sticky or non-sticky immersive (fullscreen) mode, hiding the status and navigation bars.

Accessibility Doc Improvements

The docs team has recently improved some of our accessibility documentation. In particular, check out Make apps more accessible and Principles for improving app accessibility (especially the section on Labels, which was enhanced substantially with plenty of examples).

Now then…

That’s it for this time. Go check out the stable and beta AndroidX libraries! Watch the Droidcon NYC presentations! Check out the ADS site, #AskAndroid, and the ADS app! Learn how to handle gesture navigation issues on Android 10! Read about enabling better accessibility in your app! And come back here soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.