Android Developers Backstage

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor talk with Chris Craik and Rahul Ravikumar from the toolkit performance team. We talk about the recently released the macrobenchmark tool+library, in addition to other interesting bits like how the benchmark libraries work, how to use them, how they relate to system tracing, how to do performance debugging in general, and even a teaser of future performance ins...

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor talk with Sara N Marandi, Fred Chung and Erik Wolsheimer about the new privacy features in Android 12, such as the privacy dashboard, and the camera and microphone usage indicators. Guests Eric, Sara and Fred on the top row, and hosts Romain, Tor and Chet on the bottom row. Permission best practices →  https://goo.gle/3oVdK02   Android 12 privacy changes →  ht...

In this episode, Nick and Romain are joined by Filip Pavlis, Jelle Fresen & Jose Alcérreca to talk about Testing in Compose. They discuss how Compose's testing APIs were developed hand-in-hand with the UI toolkit, making them more deterministic and opening up new possibilities like manipulating time. They go on to discuss the semantics tree, interop testing, screenshot testing and the possibilitie...

In this episode Nick and Chet are joined by Dois Liu and Nader Jawad to discuss Compose's Animation and Graphics systems. They cover their goals to make both systems easier to understand, more consistent and simpler to work with. They explain how they adapted traditionally imperative systems to a declarative world and give an overview of both the high level composables the library offers as well a...

In this episode, Romain and Tor are joined by Adarsh Fernando, Arif Sukoco and Yahan Zhou from the Android Studio team, covering the recent improvements to support for testing. This includes automated test snapshots, where the emulator captures a snapshot for a failing test you can then load and analyze later, it includes the Test Matrix tool where the IDE shows a matrix of tests and the devices t...

In our ongoing mini-series on Jetpack Compose, Nick and Romain talk to Clara Bayarri and Matvei Malkov about Compose's support for Material Design. They discuss how Compose supports Material Components and Material Theming out of the box, how you can customize these to your needs or how Compose makes it easier to build your own design system. They also share insights into building reusable compone...

In this second episode of our mini-series on Jetpack Compose (AD/BC) Nick and Romain are joined by Anastasia Soboleva, George Mount and Mihai Popa to talk about Compose's layout system. They explain how the Compose layout model works and its benefits, introduce common layout composables, discuss how writing your own layout is far simpler than Views and how you can even animate layout. Hosts Romain...

In this episode, Chad and Jeff from the Android Security team join Tor and Romain to talk about… security. Chad and Jeff explain what the platform does to help preserve user trust and device integrity, why it sometimes means restricting existing APIs, and touch on what apps can do or should worry about.   App security best practices Security tips Security with HTTPS and SSL   Chad: @ chadbrubaker_...

In this episode, Chet and Romain welcome Hunter and Nick from the Material Design team. Material Design was originally introduced when Android 5.0 came out and has come a long way since then. Our guests will give you an overview of some of the recent additions and improvements to the Material Design Component libraries: transitions, motion theming, Compose, large screens support and guidance, etc....

This episode is the first in the new mini-series "ADBC" on Jetpack Compose, hosted by Nick Butcher, in which we will dive deep into different topics in Android's future UI toolkit. This time, Nick and Chet talked with Adam Powell and Leland Richardson about the Compose compiler, the runtime, data flow, and that nifty feature where Compose knows when to call your Composable based on changes in data...

In this episode, we talk with Nat Duca and Sumir Kataria from the Android graphics team about the graphics stack -- covering shaders, GPUs, Vulkan, OpenGL, ANGLE, drivers, blur, pixels and of course Chet's favorite topic; colors.  Hosts Tor, Chet and Romain on the top row and guests Nat and Sumir on the bottom row   If you're ever wanted to know how to pronounce "hwui", tune in!   Sumir: @SumirKod...

Cowardly abandoned by Chet and Romain, Tor faces three guests alone. Jeffrey van Gogh, Ting-Yuan Huang, and Yigit Boyar join Tor to talk about Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP), a new, faster, and better tool to replace annotation processors. You will learn how KSP works, what it can do, why it was created, and how it is used in the Room Jetpack library. Tor, Ting-Yuan, Jeffrey, and Yigit, all lookin...

This time, Tor, Chet, and Romain talked with Rohit Sathyanarayana and Florina Muntenescu about the DataStore library. DataStore is the replacement for SharedPreferences, being better for many reasons (it's asynchronous and avoids blocking the UI thread, it is type-safe). It not only has a similar/simple key-value pair API like SharedPreferences, but also has more powerful API as well. It's current...

In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor sit down with Brian Carlstrom and Nicolas Geoffray to discuss their work on ART (the Android Runtime). Brian and Nicolas describe the early prototypes and bringup of ART, getting it production ready, as well as recent developments such as cloud profiles . Chet, Brian and Romain on the top row, and Tor and Nicolas below Brian: https://carlstrom.com Chet: @cheth...

Chet, Chris and Romain

Chet, Nick, Clara, Leland, Tor, Adam, and Romain. So many guests! This time, Tor, Romain, and Chet chatted with a few people on the Jetpack Compose team, about... Jetpack Compose! Compose hit Beta a couple of weeks ago (don't believe me? Check out the recent Android show on Compose Show !), so we took the opportunity to talk to some of the people that have helped build it. We talk about the curren...

What does a podcast look like? We don't know, so here's a picture of the podcast's website We want to hear from you! In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk about what they could do â€" or not do â€"to improve Android Developers Backstage. Please check our  survey  and let us know how you would like to see this podcast evolve. We recommend you first listen to the podcast to get the full contex...

It's history time! Or even [pre-]ART History time! We didn't take a picture this time. Please imagine what we looked like. This time, Tor, Romain, and Chet were joined by Dan Bornstein, one of the early members of the Android team. Dan joined in 2005 to create a runtime for Android, which became Dalvik. We talked about some of the early placeholder VMs used while Dalvik was coming online, some of...

Top row: Chet, Romain, Rob. Bottom row: Wale, Tor. In this episode, we chat with Wale Ogunwale and Rob Carr from the Android Framework team about the Window Manager. Tune in to learn about the evolution of the window manager, the distinction between System UI and the window manager, implementation challenges and recent architectural changes. Subscribe to the  podcast feed  or download the  audio f...

This episode is dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and colleague, Carl Quinn. Our last episode of the year arrives just in time for the holiday season. In this episode, Tor, Chet, and Romain go over everything that happened in 2020, both good and bad. We look back at how conferences have been impacted by the pandemic, why Android Studio changed its versioning scheme, the new tools and libr...

Romain, Tor, and Chet talked with Jesse Wilson from Square. Jesse has worked on several popular open-source libraries, including OkHttp, Okio, and [Ok]Moshi. We talk about those libraries, and others, and about Android, library, framework and Kotlin development. And about that nasty habit some engineers have of turning a feature request or minor annoyance into a project of creating a new open-sour...

Chet, Colin, Romain, and Tor This week, Tor, Romain and Chet are joined by a special guest: Colin White from Instacart. Colin is the author of Coil, a popular image loading library backed by Kotlin and Kotlin Coroutines. In this episode, Colin explains what Coil is, how and why it was created, etc. Subscribe to the  podcast feed  or download the  audio file  directly. Links : Coil Coil on GitHub T...

Chet, Dustin, Chris, and Romain. (Tor not pictured. Because he wasn't there) Romain and Chet talked with Dustin Lam and Chris Craik from the Toolkit team about Paging3. Paging3 (currently in alpha) is a complete rewrite of (wait for it...) Paging2, using Kotlin, coroutines, and Flow for optimal implementation and APIs. (But note that there are also APIs for developers using the Java programming la...

Top row: Tor and Romain Bottom row: Ryan and Chet In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor talk with Ryan Mitchell from the Android Framework Team. We cover the Android resources in general and the aapt2 tool in particular. Subscribe to the  podcast feed  or download the  audio file  directly. Chet :  @chethaase Romain :  @romainguy Tor :  @tornorbye Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our a...

Top row: Chet, Joshua and Romain. Bottom row: Renaud and Tor In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor talk with Renaud Paquay and Joshua Duong from the Android Studio and Android Emulator teams. We cover the new ADB over WiFi feature in Android 11, and the Android Studio support for pairing and connecting. Subscribe to the  podcast feed  or download the  audio file  directly. Links https://developer....