Android Developers Backstage

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 Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

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 fonts to emojis to performance to.... you get the idea. There was a lot of stuff to talk about. And so much subtext.

Romain, Chet, Sean, Tor, and Siyamed (using RTL support: Siyamed, Tor, Sean, Chet, and Romain)

Links:

• Text In Compose
• Compose Variable Fonts
• ComboBreaker
• ColrV1 Fonts
• i18n & Text in Android 13
• Text is hard! Rendering & Editing
• Compose Downloadable Fonts

Romain: @romainguy and [email protected]

Tor: @tornorbye and [email protected]

Chet: @chethaase and [email protected]

Siyamed:@siyamed

Sean: tech.lgbt/@objcode

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

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 and [email protected]

Tor: @tornorbye and [email protected]

Chet: @chethaase and [email protected]

James: @_jamesward

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

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 recording studio.

Links:

• Layouts in Compose
• Compose Custom layouts
• ADB 167: Jetpack Compose Layout

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

Rebecca Franks: @riggaroo

Andrei Shikov: @shikasd_

Matvei Malkov: @matvei_jj

Andrey Kulikov: @and_kulikov

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 to app performance
• Baseline profiles
• Benchmarking with Microbenchmark and Macrobenchmark
• Jetpack Tracing library
• Jetpack JankStats library

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

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

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, Toni, and Andrew

Links:

• Introduction to Media3
• ExoPlayer on GitHub
• Guide for migrating to Media3
• Jetpack Media3 on GitHub
• Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

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 studio with proper audio equipment

Links

• Android 13 for developers
• API diff

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

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

"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 working on it part-time to now having much larger teams doing many more things. Which kind of describes software development in general.

We also talk about how to expose (or not) gestures and features in a UI system. Related: there are some bonus pro-tips on using some hidden features of System UI, as a prize for careful listeners and podcast hosts.

Top: Tor & Adam, Bottom: Dan, Dan's book cover illustration, & Chet

Links:

• xkcd: Workflow

Dan: @dsandler

Adam: adam-cohenChet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

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

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: @estebandlc

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye