Android Developers Backstage

Since our original episode on location nearly nine years ago, a lot has happened in the location support for Android. In this episode, Wyatt Riley and Roy Want answer all of Tor's questions about how it works and cover recent developments like indoor location, elevation, and some tips for developers. Wyatt, Roy and Tor.   Links: Getting started guide Precise indoor location Wi-Fi Alliance(WFA) : W...

You saw it at Google I/O - now you can hear about it in the comfort of your own headphones! Tor, Romain, and Chet talk with Siva Velusamy and Sandhya Mohan from the Android Studio team about the just-launched Studio Bot. This new AI-powered assistant enables conversational queries in the IDE to help with coding, commenting, confusion, or if you just need a friend. Chet, Tor, Romain, Sandhy, and Si...

Raluca Sauciuc joins Tor and Romain to talk about what goes on behind the scenes in Android Studio. Raluca takes us through the tools and workflows used by the Android Studio team to improve performance and memory usage, and avoid future regressions. She also explains how the team adopts new versions of the IntelliJ IDE and platform, and how they can deal with massive code merges. Raluca, Romain,...

Chet and Romain talk to Jeff Hamilton and Anton Hansson from the Mainline team about "modular system components", and the new SDK extension framework which lets developers access them.  Anton Hansson top right, and Jeff Hamilton bottom left, with Romain and Chet Blog post: https://goo.gle/3S1c3g4   AndroidX convenience constants, e.g. T_EXTENSION_INT: https://goo.gle/3lEJwRx   Subscribe to Android...

This time, Tor, Romain, and Chet were joined by Siyamed Sinir and Sean McQuillan from the Android Text team to talk about, well, text. Which, it turns out, is a very deep, complicated, and constantly evolving technology. The conversation covered everything from the fundamentals of the text stack on Android to the capabilities and implementation of text in Jetpack Compose to internationalization to...

In this episode, James Ward joins Chet, Tor, and Romain to talk about Kotlin. We talked about Kotlin Multiplatform (both KMP and KMM) and what's coming for Kotlin in 2023, especially the new K2 frontend. James, Tor, Romain, and Chet. Links: Kotlin Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) Jetpack Multiplatform Libraries Compose Multiplatform by JetBrains   Romain: @romainguy  an...

This time, Romain and Chet ditched Tor so that they could geek out about graphics, talking about paths, Bézier curves, morphing, and more. Romain and Chet alone in the recording Studio.   Links: V9: Vector 9-patches Pathway: Path data querying Android Path Shape Shifter Bézier Primer The Beauty of Bézier Curves Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy

We recorded episode 191 from the studio in the London office, where Rebecca Franks from the developer relations team joined Chet as a guest host. We talked with Andrei Shikov, Matvei Malkov, and Andrey Kulikov from the Jetpack Compose engineering team about layouts, especially the lazy ones, which are the Compose equivalent of RecyclerView. Rebecca, Chet, Andrei, Andrey, and Matvei, in the London...

In this episode, Tor and Chet learn some more about performance from Carmen. Carmen works on the Android Platform Performance team and is an expert on everything related to performance. This is the perfect episode for you if you ever wanted to learn more about R8, perfetto, baseline profiles, custom performance tracing, power metrics, etc.  Tor, Carmen, and Chet   Links: Perfetto Android's guide t...

In this episode (the first in-studio-with-guests recording since early 2020!), Tor and Chet spoke with Marc Bächinger, Toni Heidenreich, and Andrew Lewis from the Android Media team, where they work on video technologies and APIs like ExoPlayer. We talked about the evolution of ExoPlayer and platform media capabilities as well as ongoing and near-future features. Back: Chet and Tor, Front: Mark, T...

It's our first episode back in the studio, and in a new, shiny studio too! In this episode, we talk about some of our favorite new features and changes of the new version of Android, both for users and developers. More importantly, the audio quality of this episode is much better thanks to the amazing work from the media production teams at Google. Tor, Romain, and Chet happy to be back in a studi...

"Our job isn't to remove complexity, but to manage it" - Glen Murphy (as remembered by Dan) In this episode, we talk with Dan Sandler and Adam Cohen from the SystemUI team. We dip into a bit of history, talking about where things were at when they joined the team (2009-10), and how things have developed in the many years since, including how these projects and teams scaled from a single person wor...

In this episode, we talk with Alan and Esteban from Android Studio about the new "Live Edit" feature recently launched at Google I/O in the Electric Eel canary build. We dive into the technology -- how it works, what the technical challenges are, and its current state. Chet with Esteban and Alan on the top row, Romain and Tor below   Links: https://goo.gle/3QmMVPV     Alan: @acleung Esteban: @este...

In this episode we chat with Jon and Andrew from the Play team about the Play Store app. The Play Store recently went through a major refactoring of their app, and Jon and Andrew will guide you through the reasons why they did it, the impact on their architecture, what problems they ran into, and why they decided to adopt Jetpack Compose for the UI layer. Jon, Romain, Andrew, Tor, and Chet   Links...

In this episode we chat with Derek and Brian from the Skia team about Skia, pixel shaders, and the new "AGSL" API that lets you provide pixel shaders for advanced graphics effects, which was recently added to the preview release of Android T. If you're interested in graphics technology, this is the episode for you.  If you're not interested in graphics... you should be.   Brian, Romain Derek Chet,...

In this episode we chat with Rahul and Leland from the Android toolkit team about "baseline profiles", a new mechanism which lets applications ship with profiling metadata used at application install time to make it start faster. We discuss how this is used in Jetpack Compose, cloud profiles in general, and more. Chet, Romain, Rahul, Leland and Tor   Links: Baseline Profile DAC Documentation   And...

In this episode, Clara (Android Toolkit), Florina (Android Developer Relations), and Daniel (Android Product Management) join your usual hosts to talk about large screens, what they are and what they mean for app developers. You will also learn about the resources at your disposal to build high quality experiences on large screen devices: from samples and guidance to canonical layouts and new APIs...

In this episode, we chat with Yigit Boyar (again!) from the Android Toolkit Team and Manuel Vivo from the Developer Relations team about application architecture. The team has released new architecture guidance, and we talk about that guidance here, as well as how our architecture recommendations apply in the new Jetpack Compose world. Yigit, Tor, Manuel, and Chet. Romain was AWOL. Check out the r...

In this episode, we chat with Yigit Boyar from the Android Toolkit Team about Kotlin multi platform, while Romain provides light background music on his piano. Yigit: @yigitboyar Romain: @romaing uy Chet: @chethaa se Tor: @tornorb ye     Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

In this episode, Chet and Romain talked with Nicole McWilliams and Petr Čermák from the London engineering office about their work on App Widgets and Digital Wellbeing.   Romain: @romainguy Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Nicole: ​​ @nicolelaure     Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor sit down to chat about the Android DevSummit, and in particular all the new features arriving in Android Studio, along with a few other topics like Chet's new jank stats library, the Android 12L release, and more. Top row: Chet and Tor. Bottom row: Romain.   The Android Studio talk discussed is https://goo.gle/3caaFDT      

In this episode, Bart Wronski takes Tor, Romain, and Chet through the camera pipeline that powers the Pixel phones. We talked about how cameras capture images, and how the algorithms responsible for Pixel's beautiful images work. If you've ever wondered how HDR+ or Night Sight works, this episode if for you! Top row: Tor and Bart. Bottom row: Chet and Romain.   Links: Bart's blog on graphics and i...

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor have a chat with Selim, Vadim and Lucas from the Android system UI team, discussing many of the new features in Android 12's user interface. Top row: Vadim, Selim and Romain. Bottom row: Lucas, Tor and Chet.   Some relevant links for the Splash screen discussion: https://goo.gle/3APByre   https://goo.gle/3zGDVeB     Selim: @selimcinek Vadim: @vadimcaen Chet: @...

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor have a chat with Gabriel Peal from Tonal, well known for his contributions to the Android community on projects such as Mavericks and Lottie. We talked about Lottie and how it helps designers and developers deliver more delightful user experiences by taking complex animations designed in specialized authoring tools such as After Effects, and rendering them eff...

In this episode, Tor and Nick are joined by Chris Sinco, Diego Perez and Nicolas Roard to discuss the features added to Android Studio for Jetpack Compose. They discuss the Compose preview, interactive preview, animation inspector and additions to the Layout inspector and their approach to create tooling to support the Compose's code-centric approach. Diego, Tor, Chris, Nicolas and Nick tooling ar...