Google I/O 2025, Android Studio at 10, Android 16 Betas, production-ready generative AI, Imagen in Firebase, kids apps on Wear OS, trusted VPNs in Play, TrustedTime, the latest in AndroidX, and more! Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development. In this edition, we’ll cover the return of Google I/O, Android Studio Turning 10, the Android 16 Betas, Imagen in Firebase, the latest in AndroidX, and more! https://medium.com/media/761b031341d3964628ceed333c16d713/hrefGet Ready for Google I/O 2025! 🎊 Mark your calendars! Go ..read more

Lifecycle 2.9.0-alpha01 introduced ViewModelScenario, a helper that simplifies unit testing for ViewModels. Why It Matters You can test a ViewModel by simply creating an instance using its constructor in your test code. However, this approach has limitations — there is no straightforward way to: Trigger ViewModelStore.clear() / ViewModel.onCleared(). Simulate a save and restore instance state change. With ViewModelScenario, these are now easy to test, helping you catch errors related to ViewModel clean-up and saved state. How to Use First, add the dependency to your ..read more

This is a guest post from amo Engineer, Cyril Mottier, on how they’ve leveraged Android to create magic in their Android app. At amo, we are redefining what it means to build social applications. Our mission is to create a new kind of social company, one that prioritizes high-quality, thoughtfully designed mobile experiences. One of our flagship applications, Bump, puts your friends on the map — whether you’re checking in on your crew or making moves to meet up. Our app leverages multiplatform technologies for its foundation. At the core lies a shared Rust-based library that powers ..read more

Second Developer Preview of Android 16, Android XR, Spotlight Week on Android Camera and Media, Android Studio Ladybug Feature Drop and more! Welcome to the 113th iteration of Now in Android — your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development. In this edition, we’ll cover the Second Developer Preview of Android 16, Android XR, the Spotlight Week on Android Camera and Media, the Android Studio Ladybug Feature Drop and more! https://medium.com/media/2358ae6e050808bdd54fb7d0de0cefb9/href Most of the content of this post is available in the form of a video ..read more

Part 3 of Unlocking the Power of CameraX in Jetpack Compose Hey there! Welcome back to our series on CameraX and Jetpack Compose. In the previous posts, we’ve covered the fundamentals of setting up a camera preview and added tap-to-focus functionality. ? Part 1: Building a basic camera preview using the new camera-compose artifact. We covered permission handling and basic integration. ? Part 2: Using the Compose gesture system, graphics, and coroutines to implement a visual tap-to-focus. ? Part 3 (this post): Exploring how to overlay Compose UI elements on top of your camera preview for ..read more

Part 2 of Unlocking the Power of CameraX in Jetpack Compose This blog post is a part of Camera and Media Spotlight Week. We’re providing resources — blog posts, videos, sample code, and more — all designed to help you uplevel the media experiences in your app. To learn more about what Spotlight Week has to offer and how it can benefit you, be sure to read our overview blog post. Welcome back! In the first post of this series, we built a basic camera preview using the new camera-compose artifact. We covered permission handling and basic integration, and now it’s time to get more ..read more

Part 1 of Unlocking the Power of CameraX in Jetpack Compose This blog post is a part of Camera and Media Spotlight Week. We’re providing resources — blog posts, videos, sample code, and more — all designed to help you uplevel the media experiences in your app. To learn more about what Spotlight Week has to offer and how it can benefit you, be sure to read our overview blog post. We’ve heard from you that you love the power that both the CameraX and Jetpack Compose libraries give you, but that you’d like idiomatic Compose APIs for building Camera UIs. This year, our engineering t ..read more

Compose Tips for Delightful UI — ’24 wrap up In July 2024, we launched a brand new YouTube series called “Compose Tips for Delightful UI”. The series set out to give short, actionable and technical tips for working with Jetpack Compose and share small examples of APIs that are not as widely known. We aimed to show how you can achieve a premium look and feel of your app, by using the powers and strengths of Compose, and cover the most important (but low cost) UI concepts to keep in mind when designing and developing an app. With the end of 2024 approaching, we ended our Season 1 ..read more

Now in Android #112 First Developer Preview of Android 16, our Spotlight Week on Passkeys, Stability and Performance Improvements to the Android Emulator and more! Welcome to the 112th iteration of Now in Android: your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development. In this edition, we’ll cover the First Developer Preview of Android 16, our Spotlight Week on Passkeys, Stability and Performance Improvements to the Android Emulator and more! https://medium.com/media/5c0346bbefed7a72fce8180dafc0d70f/hrefhttps://medium.com/media/12747659c66477e006ae91062 ..read more

Vulkan 1.4: Faster app loads, less stutter and less Memory Usage Host Image Copy is a game changer for Android Overview Vulkan 1.4 was released recently, and with it comes a significant feature for Android: Host Image Copy, based on VK_EXT_host_image_copy. We have previously written about this extension in this Khronos blog post, explaining the technical details of using this extension. This extension is particularly useful for Android games as we’ll see in this post. In short, Host Image Copy is a Vulkan feature that allows the application to transfer image data using the CPU i ..read more