Among these announcements was the launch of the Watch Face Format. This offers developers a new way to build watch faces for Wear OS smartwatches with a declarative XML format to design the appearance and behavior of watch faces.

According to Google, this means there is no need for the executable code involved in building a watch face, and there is also no code embedded in the watch face APK.  With this release, users can create analogue and digital watch faces, watch faces with complications, customizable watch faces, and more. 

Updates have also been made to Jetpack Compose, including the ability to bring Compose everywhere that the developer is building UI, whether that be on a phone, tablet, foldable device, watch, or TV. These changes are available in the May 2023 release and the most recent alpha versions of the Compose libraries.

Furthermore, the performance of Compose has been improved. The company stated that since October, modifiers have started to migrate to an improved system, and with this, text has seen a 22% performance gain that can be seen in the latest alpha release.

The alpha version of the UI framework for creating functional apps for Android TV Compose for TV has also been released. With this, apps can be built with less code, easier maintenance, and a modern Material 3 look. 

Next, Android Studio Hedgehog was launched in order to offer developers an AI powered conversational experience geared at heightened productivity. This offers improved tools when developing for multiple form factors, and helps to improve the quality of applications with new insights, debugging, and testing solutions.

Android for Cars also received updates intended to expand the reach developers have with users in the car.

Among these updates is the global rollout of Waze on the Google Play Store for all cars with Google built-in. Additional templates were also created for Android for Cars App Library in order to accelerate development time across several app categories, such as navigation.

This update also brings tools to port media apps across Android for Cars; new app categories for driving experiences; and video, gaming, and browsing in cars. 

Additionally, Google Play has been updated so that on top of the ability to tailor by country and pre-registration status, users can now customize listings for inactive users, so they have the chance to try out an app or game again.

Google also announced that custom store listing groups for Google Ads App campaign ad groups are set to be launched in the near future. This will allow for custom listings to be served to users coming from specific ads on AdMob and YouTube.

Next, Google Workspace adds Duet AI, combining all of Workspace’s generative AI features and allowing users to collaborate with AI so they can enhance their productivity. Duet AI is also coming to Google Cloud, enabling users to solve common work challenges with the AI collaborator.

There have also been several updates to Vertex AI, including three new foundation models that can be accessed through API, tuned through an AI in Generative AI Studio, or deployed to a data science notebook. 

Lastly, Google Cloud has launched the next-generation A3 GPU supercomputer. With this, Google Cloud offers users a complete range of GPU for the training and inference of machine learning models. 

For more information on these releases, visit the website. 

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With Flutter 3, users are enabled to build experiences for six platforms from a single codebase, offering developers heightened productivity and enabling startups to bring new ideas to the full addressable market from the start.

Additionally, this release offers added support for macOS and Linux apps, bringing users new input and interaction models, compilation and build support, accessibility and internalization, and platform-specific integration. 

According to the company, the goal of this is to provide customers with the flexibility to take advantage of the underlying operating system while sharing as much UI and logic as they choose. 

Flutter has invested in supporting both Intel and Apple Silicon on macOS, with Universal Binary support that allows apps to package executables that run natively on both architectures. 

On Linux, Canonical and Google have worked in collaboration with each other to bring users a highly-integrated, best-of-breed option for development.

With improved performance, Material You support, and productivity updates, Flutter 3 also works to enhance many of the fundamentals.

This version is also fully native on Apple Silicon for development, allowing users to take full advantage of Dart’s support for Apple Silicon.  

Flutter’s work for Material Design 3 is also mostly completed with this release. This enables developers to take advantage of an adaptable, cross-platform design system that offers dynamic color schemes as well as updates visual components.

To learn more about Flutter 3, visit the website. 

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The future of Kotlin
First, the team announced that they will be putting more of a focus on making Android development Kotlin-first. This means that new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered in Kotlin and there will be more investment in Kotlin tooling, docs, training, and events. Furthermore, they recommend that new projects be written in Kotlin.

New Jetpack libraries
The team also released six new alpha Jetpack libraries and five beta ones. Android Jetpack is an API that accelerates development and makes it easier to write Android apps.

Key new libraries include CameraX, Architecture Components, and Jetpack Compose. CameraX is a library to make camera development easier by providing a consistent experience across devices so that developers don’t have to maintain specific configurations for each device. Its new architecture components include a ViewModel with SavedState module, which will enable developers to eliminate boilerplate code. It also added coroutines to LiveData and Lifecycles to support common one-shot asynchronous operations. Jetpack Compose is a library that simplifies UI development by combining a reactive programming model with Kotlin, the team explained.

Android Studio 3.5 beta
The team also released a beta of Android Studio 3.5. According to Google, Android Studio 3.5 includes better IDE memory management, lower typing latency, lint improvements, CPU usage optimizations, layout editor improvements, emulator improvements, and build changes.

It also will include a rewritten version of Instant Run, which is now called Apply Changes. Apply Changes accelerates developers’ ability to see code changes on a device.

Android App Bundle updates
Android App Bundle, which was introduced last year, is getting a number of new updates to help developers reduce app size and deliver apps faster. Dynamic feature modules, now a stable feature, allow developers to reduce app size by choosing what parts of an app to deliver, based on things like device features or country.

It is also moving in-app updates to stable, which will enable developers to dynamically update apps.

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With the beta release of Android P, the operating system is getting a new “Jetpack” designed to accelerate development. Android Jetpack is “the next generation of Android components” and features benefits of the support library to a bigger set of components.

“Guided by your feedback, we’ve focused our efforts on making mobile development fast and easy, helping you get more users by making apps radically smaller, and increasing engagement to keep users coming back,” Stephanie Cuthbertson, product management director for Android, wrote in a post.

As part of Jetpack, the company is launching Android KTX designed to optimize the Kotlin development experience. Google announced support for Kotlin last year, and since then it has seen 95 percent of Android developers happy with the support. Android KTX will provide a set of Kotlin extensions and optimize Jetpack and Android APIs for the programming language. In addition, the company announced the launch of Kotlin Bootcamp on Udacity to help developers get started with Kotlin.

Android Studio 3.2 Canary was revealed with tools for Android Jetpack, a visual navigation editor, and new code refactoring tools.

Other operating system release announcements include a new app model, the Android app Bundle, to reduce app size; Google Play’s Dynamic Delivery for delivering code and resources that match a user’s device; new features and reports in the Play Console; and the availability of Google Play Instant for game developers.

The company also announced the Wear OS by Google developer preview 2, which includes support for Actions on Google and power-related enhancements such as a battery saver mode.

A major update to its augmented reality platform ARCore was released to help developers create even more immersive experiences. The company announced Cloud Anchors to help enable collaborative AR experiences, Vertical Plane Detection for placing AR objects on more surfaces, and Sceneform for faster AR development.

Additionally, Google announced plans to acquire Velostrata, a cloud migration technology provider. “As more and more enterprises move to the cloud, many need a simple way to migrate from on-premises and adopt the cloud at their own pace. This helps them take advantage of what the cloud has to offer—speed, scalability, and access to technologies like advanced data analytics and machine learning,” Eyal Manor, VP of engineering for Google Cloud, wrote in a post.

According to the company, the acquisition will help users adapt workloads on-the-fly and decouple their compute from storage without degrading performance.

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“We’re at an important inflection point in computing, and it’s exciting to be driving technology forward. It’s clear that technology can be a positive force and improve the quality of life for billions of people around the world. But it’s equally clear that we can’t just be wide-eyed about what we create,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, wrote in a post.

Google announced plans to make Google Assistant more visually and naturally helpful. With progress in language understanding, Google Assistant will soon be able to provide a natural back-and-forth conversation, eliminating the need to repeat “Hey Google” with follow-up requests. In addition, Assistant is getting new experiences for Smart Displays and coming to Google Maps for navigation. “Someday soon, your Google Assistant might be able to help with tasks that still require a phone call, like booking a haircut or verifying a store’s holiday hour,” Pichai wrote.

Google Maps was updated with new AI capabilties that enable the app to tell users if the business they are looking for is open, how busy it is, and how bad is parking. “Advances in computing are helping us solve complex problems and deliver valuable time back to our users—which has been a big goal of ours from the beginning,” Pichai wrote.

Android P was revealed with new AI features designed to make it smarter and easier to use. The upcoming operating system saw a slew of new features designed to drastically improve battery life, bring snappier system navigation, and more useful Do Not Disturb and brightness management designed to improve users’ “digital well-being.”

To help make the entire device experience smarter beyond just the operating system, the company announced a new set of cross-platform APIs for developers. ML Kit provides on-device APIs for text recognition, face detection, image labeling, barcode scanning, landmark detection and smart reply as well as access to Google’s cloud-based machine learning technology.  

“Architecturally, you can think of ML Kit as providing ready-to-use models, built on TensorFlow Lite and optimized for mobile,” said keynote speaker Dave Burke, Android’s VP of engineering.

Also coming with Android P are “App Actions” and “Slices,” which can streamline users’ experiences by providing predictive shortcuts or app UI elements to actions they’re likely to be attempting.

“To support App Actions, developers just need to add an actions.xml file to their app and then actions surface not just in the launcher, but in smart text selection, Play Store, Google Search and the Assistant,” Burke said.

To illustrate App Actions, Burke used the example of buying movie tickets. By simply beginning to type the name of a film into Google Search, Android P displays a button that will take the user to the ticket purchasing tab of the Fandango app.

Slices are a bit more complex.

“Actions are a simple, but powerful idea for providing deep links into an app given your context. Even more powerful is bringing part of the app UI to the user right there and then,” Burke explained. “We call this feature ‘Slices.’ Slices are a new API for developers to define interactive snippets of their app UI that can be surfaced in different places in the OS. In Android P, we’re laying the groundwork by showing Slices first in Search.”

Burke illustrated with the example of typing “Lyft” into Google Search, where a Slice displayed the option to instantly request a ride home from the ride-sharing service using its app’s own UI, pared down to a Slice.

“With Android P, we’ve put a personal emphasis on simplicity by addressing many pain points where we thought, and you told us, the experience was more complicated than it ought to be,” Burke said. “And you’ll find these improvements on any device that adopts Google’s version of the Android UI, such as Google Pixel and Android One devices.”

Other announcements included a new Google Photos partner program for developers and the availability of Google Lens directly in the camera app on supported devices.

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Indigo Design Code Studio is comprised of the Infragistics Design System, Indigo Studio, and Code Generation and UI Components for Angular and Flutter.

The Infragistics Design System features a library of UI components, UI patterns, pre-defined screens, and complete app scenarios built using Sketch.

Indigo Studio is a graphical prototype tool that uses drag-and-drop to upload designs, add capabilities such as navigation and transitions between screens, and work with stakeholders and get feedback. It also allows user to perform usability studies with built-in video playback and analytics on studies.

Users will be able to create Angular or Flutter applications for Android and iOS using Indigo D2C Studio Visual Studio Code plug-in and UI components.

“We are thrilled to be at Google I/O today and announce our commitment to become a leading player in the Flutter ecosystem,” said Jason Beres, senior vice president of developer tools at Infragistics. “We share the Flutter team vision on providing designers and developers the tools they need to realize increased performance, productivity, and the ability to deliver a powerful UI.  With Indigo D2C Studio we are working hard to leverage the tools and frameworks designers and developers love the most, integrate the ability to collaborate on prototypes, and take the guesswork out of the asset hand-off and spec creation with code generation for Flutter and Angular apps.”

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“Our investments in the web mean that developers can distribute their creations to anyone, regardless of device—whether it’s desktops, phones, or VR and AR enabled devices,” according to Bavor.

RELATED CONTENT: Google open-sources Firebase SDKs, opens up Android Instant Apps, and provides new developer features

The company announced Instant Preview, a new solution that enables developers to make changes on their computer, and immediately see the results in seconds. “Instant Preview allows you to skip the build process and test your VR app instantly on your device, significantly improving iteration time. Instant Preview consists of an Android app for your Daydream-ready device and a plugin for your Unity or Unreal editor. It supports two modes: Full VR Preview mode and Controller-only mode,” according to the solution’s website.

Additionally, the company announced Seurat, a new technology for real-time rendering of high-fidelity scenes on mobile VR headsets. Seurat, named after the French painter Georges-Pierre Seurat, gives developers desktop-level graphics with a mobile GPU.

Google’s other immersive experiences include its smartphone augmented reality technology Tango, and its mobile virtual reality platform Daydream. Standalone Daydream headsets are expected later this year.

Also announced at today’s conference was the release of Android Wear 2.0. The latest version features informative watch faces, new complications API tools, and new UI library for Wear developers. More information is available here.

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“Whether it’s Android, Chrome, Play, VR/AR, the Cloud, and the Mobile Web — we’re constantly investing in the platforms that connect developers to billions of users around the world,” Jason Titus, vice president for the developer product group at Google, wrote in a post.

RELATED CONTENT: Google kicks off Google I/O 2017 with Android Go, Kotlin, and Cloud TPU announcements 

Firebase is the company’s mobile and web app development platform. Google announced the expansion of Firebase into a full mobile development platform at last year’s I/O conference. Yesterday, the company announced it has started open sourcing its Firebase products in its iOS, JavaScript, Java, Node.js and Python SDKs. In addition, all three of Google’s Firebase Admin SDKs have also been open sourced.  

“By making our SDKs open, we’re aiming to show our commitment to greater transparency and to building a stronger developer community. To help further that goal, we’ll be using GitHub as a core part of our own toolchain to enable all of you to contribute as well. As you find issues in our code, from inconsistent style to bugs, you can file issues through the standard GitHub issue tracker,” Salman Qadri, Firebase product manager, wrote in a post.

Last year, Google previewed Android Instant Apps at Google I/O, which the company began initial live testing for in January. Yesterday, the company announced Android Instant Apps is now open to all developers. Instant Apps was designed to give users a way to run Android apps without having to install them. This announcement lets all Android developers build and publish instant apps.

“Instant Apps continues to ramp up on the latest Android devices in more than 40 countries. And with Android O, we’ve gone further, building a new, more efficient runtime sandbox for instant apps, sharable support libraries to reduce app size, and launcher integration support,” Jonathan Karmel, product manager at Google, wrote in a post.

Google also announced new developer features in its Google Play Console. The new features aim to improve application performance and quality as well as help developers grow their Google Play business. These features include a statistics page, Android vitals to understand behaviors, an updated ANRs and crashes page, a new release dashboard to track releases, a new device catalog, app signing, a pre-launch report, a subscriptions dashboard, and reviews analysis. More information on features are available here.

Additionally, the company announced a guide to Android app architecture. The guide provides best practices for developing an Android application, and ways to interact with Android.

Other announcements included two new web development certifications as part of the Associate Android Developer Certification: The Mobile Sites Certification and the Mobile Web Specialist Certification, as well as an improvement to Google Assistant and the introduction of the Google Payment APIs. The new API gives developers the ability to provide payment services in their apps and online.

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At today’s kick-off of Google I/O 2017, Google announced several ways it is embracing this shift in computing. The company also announced a few ways that it is making life easier for its 800 million active users and its many developers.

To start, Google, which has never added a programming language to Android, announced that it added support for Kotlin. Kotlin is a statically typed programming language for the Java Virtual Machine, and it’s a preferred language for writing Android apps.

Some companies have already adopted the programming language into their production apps, including Pinterest and Square. Developers can get started with Kotlin by downloading the Android Studio 3.0 preview.

As a way to bring computing to everyone, Google announced its new mission called “Android Go,” which is designed around three things: the operating systems, the apps, and the play experience.

Dave Burke, vice president of engineering at Android, wrote in a blog that the Android Go experience will ship in 2018 for all Android devices that have 1GB or less of memory. The goal is to help manufacturers continue to offer lower-cost devices that still provide great user experiences.

Google then showcased ways that Android developers can create new apps and experiences for users. The company announced the release of the Android O Developer Preview 2, which comes with notification dots, a new way for developers to surface activity in their apps. Google also designed Picture-in-Picture, which provides seamless multitasking on any size screen, and it announced a new homescreen for Android TV, which developers will be able to get started by using the new TvProvider support library APIs.

Google also announced its new TPUs, designed specifically to advance its AI training and create intelligent applications. Each chip provides 180 teraflops for processing the tasks, and the chips are even able to be placed together into sets called TPU Pods, which provides up to 11.5 petaflops to accelerate the training of a large machine learning model.

The new TPUs are coming to Google Compute Engine as Cloud TPUs, where the TPUs can be connected to other virtual machines and hardware like Skylake CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs. And, in order to help as many researchers as possible, Google is also making 1,000 Cloud TPUs available at no cost to machine learning researchers via the new TensorFlow Research Cloud.

Pichai said that in order to drive the shift and apply AI to solve specific problems, it would help if there was one place that focused on bringing the benefits of AI to everyone. Google is doing that with the site Google.ai, which focuses specifically on three pillars: state of the art research, tools and infrastructure, and applied AI. As part of Google’s applied AI efforts, it wants thousands of developers to be able to use machine learning.

Also during the keynote, Google announced AutoML, which is a new reinforced learning approach to teach neural nets to train other neural nets how to learn. Pichai calls this “learning to learn,” and joked that it’s kind of like the movie “Inception.”

“We must go deeper,” Pichai joked.

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Both operating system versions are available; however, the Android app is currently in beta. All of the functionality works but the team is making a few tweaks to the user interface, according to a Stack Overflow blog post.

The Stack Overflow app not only lets developers read, ask, answer, comment, flag and vote on questions, but also draft questions on the go and get push notifications when someone answers or comments on a question.

For developers that already have the Stack Exchange app, the Stack Overflow app has one key difference, and that is it contains Stack Overflow questions and answers. The existing Stack Exchange app and the Stack Overflow app will deliver notifications split in two, so all notifications will appear separately and delivered in their respective application.

Besides announcing its new application, Stack Overflow decided to dig into the history of mobile app development by using its recently released Stack Overflow Trends tool, which lets them examine what mobile-related technologies have been growing or shrinking in developer activity.

According to their findings, the notable shift for Android development started with the introduction of the Android Studio IDE in 2013, which became the most asked-about tags related to the platform, said Stack Overflow.

While iOS and Android received a lot of traction among app developers, Blackberry and Windows phones lagged behind. Stack Overflow also wrote that there are several increasingly popular tools for developing cross-platform applications that are deployed on both Android and iOS.

Another shift that Stack Overflow found interesting was between two back-end-as-a-service products used with applications, Firebase and Parse. According to a post by David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, Facebook announced it was shutting down the Parse platform in 2016, and the questions on Parse within Stack Overflow dropped immediately. Later, Google launched an expanded version of the Firebase platform, and “the number of developers asking questions about it skyrocketed,” wrote Robinson.

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