Google’s annual developer conference must therefore speak to, among other things, developers. Here are some announcements on the development tools side.
During the Google I/O 2022 opening keynote, several improvements and new features were announced on Android Studio, Jetpack Compose, application development for Android tablets, Wear OS improvements, Google Play and a new Health Connect platform.
Here’s a quick recap of the new developer tools announced at Google I/O 2022.
Android Studio earns a live edition
There are two new versions of Android Studio, the software suite and the tools developers use to build Android apps. Android Studio Dolphin Beta and Electric Eel Canary are two different versions that not only have creative names but also their own set of new features.
In the Dolphin Beta, developers will have access to these new features, according to Google:
- View, Compose animations and coordinate them with Animation Preview.
- Define annotation classes to easily include and apply multiple Compose preview definitions at the same time.
- Track recomposition counts for your composables in Layout Inspector.
- Easily pair and control Wear OS emulators and launch tiles, watch skins and complications directly from Android Studio.
- Diagnose application problems faster with Logcat V2.
In the Canary version of Android Studio, developers will get a preview of the new Live Edit feature that will immediately reflect any code edits in Compose Preview for a running app, both in the emulator or on a device. physical. Other changes to Canary include a new Google Play SDK index for viewing dependencies, Firebase Crashlytics feature in Android Studio, and a resizable Android emulator.
Google hopes to gather developer feedback on all new Android Studio features before releasing them or moving them to a more stable version.
Android Jetpack offers more tools for developers
Android Jetpack is a resource of tools and APIs that developers can use to enhance their apps. Jetpack Compose Beta 1.2 includes several new APIs and tools that developers can use in their applications. New APIs include JankStats, which helps analyze application performance, including dropped frames. There are also new APIs for downloadable fonts, drag-and-drop for sharing data between apps, and better tools for app benchmarking.
A new version of Jetpack Compose is also available in beta. It’s designed to help developers build apps for the Android Wear OS platform, including the just-announced Pixel Watch.
There are many other improvements
Google also announced new tools and initiatives outside the scope of Jetpack or Android Studio. For example, a new Health Connect platform, built in partnership between Samsung and Google, will provide access to a user’s health data.
New features are also planned for Android for Cars and Android TV OS, but apart from a little teaser, Google only said we could learn more by attending the dev sessions on May 12. One thing we do know is that Google Assistant is getting easier to use in Android for Cars thanks to a new API, as well as Wear OS apps later this year.
As for Google Play updates, developers can expect to see the Google Play SDK Index, a Privacy Sandbox on Android for advertisers to respect a user’s privacy while making ads available. , the new Google Wallet API (formerly Google Pay Passes API) will support mixed passes and direct pass registration support.
And, of course, Android 13 was talked about extensively at Google I/O, with lots of new APIs and new onboarding tools for developers.
All about Google I/O 2022
Source: “ZDNet.com”