Android Developers Backstage

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.

Material Design website

Material You

What's new with Material at I/O

Material Design Components for Android

Material Motion with MDC

Hunter: @hunter_stich

Nick: @ricknout

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

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 state.

Also check out:

Thinking in Compose

Compose State Guide

Compose State Codelab

Lifecycle of composables

Side-effects in Compose

Compose Learning Pathway

Adam: @adamwp

Leland: @intelligibabble

Nick: @crafty

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

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: @SumirKodes

Nat: Link

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy

Tor: @tornorbye

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 looking amazingly happy to discuss annotation and symbol processing

KSP announcement

KSP GitHub project

How to get started with KSP

Libraries with KSP support

Jetpack Room

Jeffrey: @jvgogh

Yigit: @yigitboyar

Tor: @tornorbye

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 currently in alpha, but look for it to be the recommended approach soon as it approaches stable.

Florina, Romain, Chet, Daniel (ADB audio producer, in person!), Tor, and Rohi Article: Using DataStore in Kotlin Serialization Docs: Docs Codelab: Preferences Datastore codelab Codelab: Proto Datastore codelab Florina: @FMuntenescu Rohit: @rohitsat123 Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye

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: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye

Chet and Romain host Chris Lacy, a long time independent Android developer. In this episode, Chris explains how he decides what apps to build, how he used various platform APIs to create innovative applications like LinkBubble, and what challenges he faces.

Chet, Chris and Romain

Chris's apps include: SwirlWalls, a live wallpaper ActionLauncher, a replacement launcher By the way, Chris is looking to hire an Android developer. If interested, you can reach him at [email protected]. Chris: @chrismlacy Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye

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 current state of the library, but also about some of the design decisions that went into developing the APIs and functionality. (Note on the audio quality for this episode - it turns out that mixing so many people, all of whom recorded themselves separately using very different hardware and setups was... tricky. It's listenable, but maybe a tad below the level we shoot for. Blame the pandemic. I do.) Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. #TheAndroidShow: Jetpack Compose The Jetpack Compose site (overview, tutorial, docs, samples, and more) Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye Nick: @crafty Clara: @clarabayarri Leland: @intelligibabble Adam: @adamwp Thanks to our audio engineer, Dustin Elm, who has handled all of our audio mixing for the last couple of years, including the tricky part of mixing all of our remote- recorded episodes, like this one. Dustin's moving on to (greener? softer? louder?) pastures, so we'll be using a new, exciting process for mixing future episodes. Thanks, Dustin!

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 context for some of the questions in the survey. 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 audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

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 the design decisions for Dalvik (like its register-based vs. stack-based implementation), and nice techy details about runtimes, garbage collectors, and optimizations. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye Dan: @danfuzz Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.