Welcome!

One of my favorite things about the Android team is that we are all so enthusiastic about the technology we work on and about helping developers use it that we push information of all kinds (libraries, articles, samples, codelabs, videos, tweets, blogs, etc.) constantly and independently. Which is… awesome; I much prefer this model to one where everything goes through some sort of corporate funnel, resulting in a slow drip-drip-drip of formal, company-sanctioned artifacts.

But from the outside, it must be a little bewildering, wondering what and whom to listen to to catch the latest important news and bits. (Don’t tell anyone, but it’s not much less confusing on the inside; there’s a lot going on in parallel).

I thought it might help to try to collect, on an ongoing basis, some of the recent highlights that I’ve seen fly by to help you find things that you might otherwise have missed. This “Now in Android” article is an attempt to do that. Ideally, it will be the first in a regular series (see the subtle hint of this embedded in the use of “#1” in the title). Actually, my recent What’s Now in Android: Google I/O could be considered episode #0, because programmers are usually zero-based, so maybe it’s already a series.

So, welcome to Now in Android: Episode #1(the Collector’s Edition!).

There were some newsworthy things coming out of the Android team in the past few weeks that I wanted to call your attention to.

Kotlin@OSCON

First of all, I hope you heard that Kotlin was named the “Breakout Project of the Year” at OSCON 2019. It’s pretty great news for Jetbrains and the Kotlin team, recognizing all of the excellent work that they’ve done and all of the amazing things that you’ve been able to do with the language so far. So… yay!

AndroidX Versions

A simple, yet important, doc appeared on developer.android.com a few weeks ago. Normally another single page on that developer site wouldn’t warrant a separate callout. I mean, there are some pretty great pages on that site, but any one in particular is just one of many. But in this case, it was definitely worth a mention.

You’re not the only one.

The problem raised by many of you was that it’s been really difficult to get a handle on what version of any particular AndroidX library is current. One of the great things about Jetpack libraries has been that they are now much more independent than the old Support Library that they grew out of. But the tradeoff of this is that they are all marching to their own release drummers, and it’s not obvious when you’re staring at the build file of your favorite IDE which version of what library you need.