Android Developers Backstage

In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk with Aurash Mahbod from the Play Games team at Google -- covering trends in mobile games, challenges for Android games developers, console games, and more!

Chapters:

Intro (00:00)

What's Aurash working on currently? (02:40)

How much is Play store providing users with content based on previous interests? (05:29)

Longstanding games vs new games (08:34)

Mobile gaming vs console (10:07)

Are there stats on what type of games people are playing? (18:07)

Difficulties and solutions for transitioning games from various devices (21:14)

Movie corner - War Games (25:15)

How does Play console help devs optimize engagement? (26:23)

What is the breakdown of tools that devs actually use for games? (27:53)

Reducing the backend costs for devs (30:18)

Where does loyalty content surface? (34:28)

Balancing add load (35:16)

Cloud saves (38:18)

Aurash's history with Play store (42:18)

Wrap up (42:58)

Romain: @romainguy, threads.net/@romainguy, [email protected]

Tor: threads.net/@tor.norbye and [email protected]

Chet: @chethaase, threads.net/@chet.haase, and [email protected]

Aurash: https://twitter.com/aurash - @aurash

Catch videos on YouTube → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast

In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk about one of Tor's favorite topics: Lint! Specifically, we talk about Lint checks and the annotations that use them to enable better, more robust, and more self-documenting APIs. Lint: It's not just for pockets anymore.

Chapters:

Intro (00:00)

Lint checks for annotations (01:50)

Lint checks in Android (05:38)

Logic checks (07:34)

Color representations (10:01)

How does lint know the type of integer? (14:40)

Kotlin annotations (17:19)

Unsigned (20:10)

HalfFloat (22:25)

Thread annotations (25:12)

@CallSuper (28:18)

LayoutOpt (30:26)

Lint checks in AndroidX (32:00)

Restrict to annotation (36:45)

Writing your own custom Lint checks (39:51)

Lint testing framework (43:26)

Kotlin buildList Lint check example (45:25)

@Discouraged (48:15)

Wrap up (50:08)

@Deprecated Chet (50:50)

Romain: @romainguy, threads.net/@romainguy, [email protected]

Tor: threads.net/@tor.norbye and [email protected]

Chet: @chethaase, threads.net/@chet.haase, and [email protected]

Catch videos on YouTube → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast

Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk about some of the many things that happened this year in the world of Android development, including new devices and form factors, tool improvements, AndroidX features and libraries, and Jetpack Compose releases. And any tech podcast would be remiss without mentioning AI/ML, so we talk about that too.

Tor, Romain and Chet

Chapters:

Intro (00:00)

Google engineers vs Android (00:57)

Big changes of 2023 intro (3:03)

AI (3:38)

Programming with AI (5:08)

Writing with AI (8:52)

New devices from Android - Pixel fold (12:31)

Pixel watch (18:50)

Bard (19:37)

Changes in device release times (20:23)

Major changes in devices vs incremental updates (21:42)

Camera (22:40)

Platform developments - mainline modules (24:03)

More testing for Android (25:12)

Flaky tests (26:55)

Jetpack compose features (32:32)

RTO (38:00)

Shapes library and KMP (42:42)

Final thoughts on big events of 2023 (45:03)

Studio build improvements (46:43)

Baseline profiles (49:21)

Listener mail (50:45)

Where has Chet been? (52:46)

Metalava question (55:46)

Wrap up wrap up (57:00)

Romain: @romainguy, threads.net/@romainguy, [email protected]

Tor: threads.net/@tor.norbye and [email protected]

Chet: @chethaase, threads.net/@chet.haase, and [email protected]

Catch videos on YouTube → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast

Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

In this episode, Tor and Romain chat with Aurimas Liutikas from the AndroidX team. Topics include performance tuning the AndroidX Gradle builds using configuration caching, local caching and remote caching, as well as tracking API compatibility using the Metalava tool.

Aurimas, Romain and Tor

Romain: @romainguy, threads.net/@romainguy, [email protected]

Tor: threads.net/@tor.norbye and [email protected]

Aurimas: androiddev.social/@Aurimas and www.liutikas.net/blog-posts

Catch videos on YouTube → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast

Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

In this episode, Tor and Romain chat with Greg Baker and Joe Baker-Malone about exciting new Android Studio features made possible by Firebase integration. Physical device streaming allows you to connect remotely to physical devices hosted in Google's secure data centers and use them for all your development needs. We also explore other time saving features like the ability to go from a crash report directly to the correct line of code, even across git branches.

Tor, Romain, Joe, Greg

Links:

• Android Device Streaming from Android Studio feedback form

• App Quality Insights and Firebase Crashlytics

Romain: @romainguy, romainguy@threads, [email protected]

Tor: tor.norbye@threads and [email protected]

Greg: @[email protected]

In this episode, Chet and Romain speak with Ken Russell and Corentin Wallez from the WebGPU team. WebGPU is a new API that brings modern GPU rendering and compute functionality to web and other platforms (including Android!). We talk about the genesis and capabilities of WebGPU, WGSL (WebGPU's new shading language), the state of WebGL (the predecessor API for web GPU rendering), and lots of other fun related graphics topics.

Ken, Romain, and Chet (not pictured: Corentin, who is on the monitor behind the photographer)

Links:

• Samples (and its github repo)

• Google I/O Codelab

• Google I/O presentation Introducing WebGPU (and associated blog post)

• Series of articles teaching WebGPU and WGSL

• Series of articles of WebGPU Best Practices

• Draft specs for WebGPU and WGSL

• Dawn from Google/Chromium

• wgpu from Firefox

Romain: @romainguy, romainguy@threads, [email protected]

Tor: tor.norbye@threads and [email protected]

Chet: @chethaase, chet.haase@threads, and [email protected]

Ken: @gfxprogrammerCorentin: @DaKangz and @[email protected]

Catch more from ADB → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

This time, Romain, Tor, and Chet talk with Leland Richardson, George Mount, and Chuck Jazdzewski from the Jetpack Compose team about performance. The team has been looking at performance issues recently and discusses what they've found, what gotchas lie in wait for library developers, what tools and compilers can magically handle for you... and what they can't. Tune in to learn about why we worry about autoboxing (and why you probably shouldn't).

Foreground: Romain, Tor, George, and Chuck Background (on the monitor): Chet, Leland, and Cody (audio engineer/producer), plus another view of the Studio with Romain, Tor, George and Chuck again, for your recursive pleasure.

Links:

• Jetpack Compose

• Android Studio Memory Profiler

• Macrobenchmark

• Baseline profiles

• Kotlin bytecode decompilation

Romain: @romainguy and [email protected]

Tor: tor.norbye@threads and [email protected]

Chet: @chethaase and [email protected]

Leland: @intelligibabble

George: @georgemount1

Chuck: @chuckjaz

Catch ADB on YouTube → https://goo.gle/adb-podcast

Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

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) : Wi-Fi Location(TM) demonstrated at a recent WFA member event

• Android Developer resources for Wi-Fi RTT (IEEE 802.11mc) Location

• Google Play Store has three apps that demonstrate Wi-Fi RTT (IEEE 802.11mc) capabilities for devices with 11mc support.

• WifitRttLocator (phone positioning in a building with 11mc capable Access Points)

• WifiRttScan (Phone to Access Point ranging)

WifiNanScan (Phone to phone ranging)

Catch ADB on YouTube→ https://goo.gle/adb-podcast

Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

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 Siva in the Sunnyvale studio

Studio Bot: https://goo.gle/3BBEKZI

Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

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, and Tor

Romain: @romainguy and [email protected]

Tor: @tornorbye and [email protected]

Chet: @chethaase and [email protected]

Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs