Android Developers Backstage

Oliver and Chet In this episode, Chet visits the Google's Android office in London and chats with Oliver Woodman about ExoPlayer, an application level media player for Android. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Links ExoPlayer GitHub Project Tor : google.com/+TorNorbye ,  @tornorbye Chet : google.com/+ChetHaase ,  @chethaase Thanks to continued tolerance a...

In this episode, Chet and Tor talk to Chris Tate from the Android framework team about cloud sync and backup, alarms and scheduling jobs. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Chris : google.com/+ChristopherTate Chet : google.com/+ChetHaase ,  @chethaase Tor : google.com/+TorNorbye ,  @tornorbye

In this episode, Tor and Chet* talk with Zak Cohen from the Android Wear team in London about his work on watch faces, graphics, and many other Android projects he's been involved with such as the movie editor, voice search and Goggles. *: Chet was not available for this episode, so his part was convincingly played by Nick Butcher from the Android developer relations group in London. Subscribe to...

Tor, Brian, Anwar and Chet In this episode, Chet and Tor talk with Brian Carlstrom and Anwar Ghuloum about Android N preview, and in particular the new features in ART, the Android Runtime. Listen in to find out about the changes to the JIT and AOT compiler, the new language features, and a lot more. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Links Android N Previe...

Chet, Ashish, Meghan, and Tor wait uncomfortably for the photograph to be taken In this episode, Tor and Chet talk with Ashish Sharma and Meghan Desai from Project Volta, an initiative starting in the Android Lollipop release to improve Android battery life. Listen in to find out what kinds of things cause high battery usage and how you can make your apps better about conserving device power. Subs...

In this episode, Tor and I talk with Shumin Zhai of Google Research. Shumin has worked for years in the area of language processing, specifically around user input on keyboards. Some of his work ended up in the Gesture Typing feature of the Google keyboard, which is all about translating user input into specific word suggestions. We talked about this work, language processing, research, and about...

The fancy ADB recording studio, with our featured guest. In this episode, Tor and I talk with... each other. This episode is all about Android Studio. In particular, we talk about the latest features and massive performance improvements in the Android Studio preview that was detailed at the Android Dev Summit and which has been in development and under improvement since then. Subscribe to the podc...

In this episode, we recycle our guest list to bring back a former guest, Yigit Boyar, this time to talk about the RecyclerView widget. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Links RecyclerView Animation talk from the Android Dev Summit Android Application Architecture talk from the Android Dev Summit Source code for the Android Architecture talk sample app The...

This time, Tor and Chet talk with Nicholas Jitkoff from the Material group about... Material Design. And design in general. And engineering. And splash screens. And other stuff. Favorite words: Materiality . Skiamorphic . Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Links Material Design Zombo Nicholas :  google.com/+NicholasJitkoffJ ,  @alcor Tor : google.com/+TorNo...

Chet, Phil, and Tor. And a lot of totally professional sound baffles This time, Tor and Chet get all musical with Phil Burk from the Android Audio team. Phil worked on the new MIDI feature in the Android 6.0 Marshmallow release, and joins the podcast to talk about MIDI (history as well as Android implementation), electronic music, and other audio-related topics. Bryan said it was his favorite epis...

In this, er, impressive episode, Tor and Chet talk with Jim Miller from the Android System UI team. We mostly chat about the new fingerprint feature in Android 6 Marshmallow (aka, "Nexus Imprint"). But we also talk about other things like Keyguard, Setup Wizard, widgets, notifications, and greasy chicken parts. "UIs, like fingerprints, are all unique." Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the...

Richard, Chet, Ben, and not Tor in the spacious London studio In this Tor-less episode, Chet talks with Ben Murdoch and Richard Coles from the Android WebView team. We talk about WebView's ability to update outside of platform releases, the transition from the original WebView to the new Chromium WebView widget, about some of the new features and APIs in recent releases, and about cute kitten bitm...

In this episode, we talk with Rachel Garb from the Android User Experience team. Tune in to hear about interaction design and about how the Android system UI (including the new volume slider UI in Android M) is designed and user-tested. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Links Material Design Spec Android Design for Success (Google I/O 2012) Don't Make Me T...

In this episode, we chat with George Mount and Yigit Boyar from the Android UI Toolkit team. Yigit and George worked on the new Data Binding feature announced at Google I/O and which is available in the preview release and in recent versions of Android Studio. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Links Data Binding Guide George Mount :  https://plus.google.co...

In this episode, we chat with Andrew Bunner and Akshay Kannan from the Nearby team. Nearby is a technology that allows devices that are, er, nearby to communicate in one of several ways (including ultrasonic frequencies, which is just kind of awesome). Favorite bits: "beeps and boops" (a technical term), "acoustical chamber" (sounds a lot cooler than it probably is), and the three most important t...

In this episode, we chat with Ben Poiesz, a product manager on the Android framework about the exciting new Permissions model in Android M. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant links Android M Permissions (Google I/O 2015) M Preview Permissions Overview Tor : google.com/+TorNorbye Chet : google.com/+ChetHaase

In this episode, we chat with Pierre-Yves Ricau (aka @Piwai, for his initials P and Y and for the benefit of non-French-speakers that find "Pierre-Yves" entirely too complicated to pronounce) from Square about his excellent Leak Canary tool, as well as other topics he's interested in -- presenting, dependency injection, and crash reporting. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file...

This time, Tor and Chet are joined by Chris Craik from the Android UI Toolkit team. Chris took time out of his busy schedule of writing performance-testing tools and fixing graphics performance issues to talk on the podcast about, well, performance-testing tools and graphics performance issues. Listen in to learn about graphics performance tips, tricks, and tools. Subscribe to the podcast feed or...

This time, Tor and Chet are joined by Chris Banes (again!) to talk about the new Android Design Library, which was released at Google I/O 2015. Listen in to find out all about CoordinatorLayout, FAB, Snackbar, and more, more, more! Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Links: Chris's blog Android Design Library Demo Android Design Support Library (Android Deve...

This time, Tor and Chet are joined by Chet and Tor when they are once again unexpectedly blown off by a special guest. Fortunately, there was plenty to talk about, including Google I/O, Android Studio 1.3, M Developer Preview, and the new Developing for Android series of articles. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Links: What's New in Android (I/O talk) Wh...

This time, Tor and Chet are joined by Chiu-Ki Chan, an external developer and frequent presenter about Android developer. Hear us talk about custom views, watch faces, TextView, learning Chinese, libraries, and other random stuff. Favorite quotes: "To get room temperature water, mix cold water and hot water. " "Bust out that paper." Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly...

This time, Tor and Chet are joined by... nobody. Instead, we just talk among ourselves about tools. From Android Studio to performance debugging tools to IDE shortcuts to memory analysis tools to Lint rules to animation debugging tools and back to Android Studio, we talk about lots of tools and then some. Favorite quotes: "How do you learn IntelliJ power commands?" "You just have to read the sourc...

Tor and Chet are joined by Gustavo Moura from the Google Fit team. We talk about the Google Fit app, but also about the GMS Core and REST APIs that enable that application and any other application that wants to take advantage of the sensor data that those APIs provide. Getting Fit, one step at a time. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Links: Google Fit De...

Tor and Chet are joined by Thomas Knych and Valera Zakharov from the Espresso team at Google. This episode is all about testing. We talk about how Espresso works, how Espresso came to be, how to use Espresso, and lots of other information about Espresso. And UI testing in general. Favorite quote: "What does failure look like?" Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Rele...

Tor and Chet are joined by Roman Nurik from the Android Developer Relations team. We talk about Asset Studio to the Muzei wallpaper to Material Design to Android Studio application templates to watchfaces to icons to the Google I/O scheduling app to Android application design to the FORM conference. I guess he's been busy. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant...