Android Developers Backstage

Romain, Chet, Alan, Nick, and a little tiny Tor in the upper-right corner In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor talked with Nick Anthony and Alan Viverette from the AndroidX team about... AndroidX. And Jetpack. And androidx. (Spoiler alert: androidx is the set of libraries. Jetpack is that... plus opinionated guidance. AndroidX is the name of the team that ships this stuff). We also talked about the release cadence (currently every two weeks, up from every-several-months a couple of years ago), the standards for release naming/versioning, API standards, and everything else in the world of AndroidX infrastructure and release. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links AndroidX releases Alan: /u/alanviverette Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Chet, Romain, Jorim, Adrian and Taran. Oh and Tor hiding the upper  right. In this episode, Tor, Chet and Romain are joined by Jorim, Adrian and Taran from the Window Manager team. We discussed newly announced capabilities of the IME (Input Method Editor) in Android  11. These new APIs allow applications to react in real-time to IME animations and thus provide a more polished and seamless user experience. It also happens to be the answer to one of your most requested features: knowing when the on-screen keyboard is showing. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Chet, Qasid, Romain, Sally, Tor, and a very mysterious guest in a very dark room in the lower-right. In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor talked (remotely!) with Sally Yuen and Qasid Sadiq from the Accessibility team. We discussed the kinds of tools and facilities that their team provides, and how developers can (and should!) make their applications more accessible. We talked about Accessibility Services, Talkback, Accessibility Scanner, organizational complexities of accessibility efforts, and more. Pro tip: Avoid creating custom widgets by using the built-in widgets in the platform to inherit accessibility functionality for free. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links Build more accessible apps: Guide with videos and links to more resources. Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Tor, Chet, and Romain, remembering the way things used to be, back when there was a recording studio instead of closets at home. In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor chat with zero guests about the current work-from-home reality, and about adjustments we've all made as we change the way we work. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Tor, Don, Chet, and Phil, on a video conference on Tor's machine. VCs are critical to mitigating (but not actually solving) latency issues with remote podcasts. In this first ever full-remote episode, Tor and Chet discuss audio programming with Don Turner from the Android DevRel team, and Phil Burk from the Android Audio Framework team. They chat about Oboe, low-latency audio, audio performance in general, etc. And because Don and Phil know everything about audio, more time was spent before the recording discussing how to properly record the episode than was spent actually recording the episode. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. If you enjoyed this episode you might also be interested in episode 39, about MIDI audio with Phil Burk. Phil: @philburk Don: @donturner Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Rahul (Work), Sumir (Manager), and Chet In this episode, Chet talks with Sumir Kataria and Rahul Ravikumar from the Android Toolkit team about Work Manager! Tune in to learn about work manager, an AndroidX library for deferrable background work, and recent changes such as on demand initialization, new lint checks, and more! Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Relevant Talks: Working with WorkManager, from the 2018 Android Dev Summit WorkManager: Beyond the basics, from the 2019 Android Dev Summit Releases & Bugs: Recent releases Link for filing issues: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/new?component=409906&template=1094197 Sumir: @SumirKodes Rahul: @tikurahul Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Kweku, Makoto, Amith, Chet, Romain, and Tor In this episode, Chet talked with Amith Yamasani, Makoto Onuki, and Kweku Adams from the framework team about power management. We waxed poetic about the heuristics the system uses to kill tasks, doze mode and how the system tries to save battery, TrimMemory requests, JobScheduler (the underlying platform facility used by WorkManager), AppStandby buckets, and more. Favorite word: OOMAdjust (Out of Memory Adjustment, but I far prefer the abbreviation) Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: App Standby Buckets Optimizing for Battery Life Improve Battery Life with Restrictions (presentation at ADS 2018) Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Mike, Romain, Yigit, and Chet In this episode, Chet and Romain talk with Yigit Boyar, from the Jetpack team, and Mike Nakhimovich from Dropbox. Mike and Yigit have been working on an Open Source library called Store. Store helps with the fetching, caching, storing and sharing of data in your application. Both Yigit and Mike used this opportunity to teach Chet and Romain about the repository pattern, how Store works, what makes building a library like Store challenging and much more. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: Store on Github Room Mike: @friendlymikhail Yigit: @ yigitboyar Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Adam, Romain, Tor, and Chet, on location in the fancy and totally upscale ADB recording studio In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk with Adam Powell from the UI Toolkit team about Jetpack Compose. The conversation meandered into declarative programming, reacting to state changes, data flowing through an application, and Kotlin domain-specific languages. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: Jetpack Compose overview Jetpack Compose tutorial Adam: @adampwp Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Tor, Nicolas, John, Romain and Chet in the Android Studio In this episode, Tor, Romain and Chet chit chat with Nicolas Roard and John Hoford from the Android Studio team about Motion Layout -- and ConstraintLayout and visual editing in the IDE. In the recording session they also promised to release ConstraintLayout 2.0 beta 4 before the podcast was released. And they achieved that: https://androidstudio.googleblog.com/2019/12/constraintlayout-200-beta-4.html. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: Constraintlayout codelab: https://developer.android.com/training/constraint-layout MotionLayout codelab: https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/motion-layout MotionLayout workshop with John and Nicolas from DroidconSF: https://camaelon.github.io/ ConstraintLayout reference page: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/constraintlayout/widget/ConstraintLayout MotionLayout reference page: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/constraintl

Michael, Chet and Romain in the cozy London recording studio. In this episode, Chet and Romain travel all the way to London to have a chat with Michael Wright. This is not Michael's first time on the podcast and one again the discussion is about displays, input devices and haptics. If you want to learn more about high refresh rate displays (90/120 Hz), HDR, audio-coupled haptics, how gamepads are supported and, curiously, about the Android API council, you found the right episode! Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

We forgot to take a picture of ourselves when we recorded this. Please use your imagination. In this episode, Chet and Florina Muntenescu (from the Android Developer Relations team) talk with Dom Elliott from the Google Play team about Android App Bundles and other Google Play features. App bundles are the new packaging format for Android apps. They allow you to upload a single version of your app, then Google Play can distribute optimized versions of that app to users, depending on device-specific capabilities, like the selected locale(s) on the device. We also talked about other recent Google Play features (related to bundles and not), such as on-demand delivery and in-app updates. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: App bundles samples On-Demand modules codelab Plaid sample Build a Modular Android App Architecture (Google I/O 2019) Navigating Your Way Around Customizable Delivery (Android Dev Summit 2019) Florina: @FMuntenescu Dom: @iamdom Chet: @ch

Tor, Jerome, Chris and Xavier in the recording studio. In this episode, Tor chats with Jerome Dochez, Chris Warrington and Xavier Ducrohet from the Android Studio build system team. We discuss a lot of topics -- the new speed attribution feature in 4.0, the effort to create new APIs for plugin authors, and a lot more. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Jerome: @dochez Xav: @droidxav Tor: @tornorbye Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Allen, Chris, Adam, part of Tor, Dan (taking the photo), and Chet. All of them are also in the monitor, but backwards. Oh, and note the gym sock being used to dampen noise on the mic. High tech stuff, ADB. In this episode, Chet and Tor talk with Chris Banes, Adam Cohen, Dan Sandler, and Allen Huang about Gesture Navigation. Gesture Nav is an important UI behavior change in the Android 10 release that developers should handle and test. Chris has written Gesture Nav articles recently. This conversation goes further into the background and reasons for the change, as well as techniques for dealing with it. Note: The audio in this episode, is not up to the usual quality bar. We had the choice between recording the conversation with a non-ideal setup or not doing it at all. We chose content over quality. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: Gesture Navigation: Going edge-to-edge (I) Gesture Navigation: Handling visual overlaps (II) Gesture Navigation: Handl

Chet, Tor, Romain, Cyril and Zarah, laughing at something stupid funny that Chet said. Amongst the many talks and announcements at the Android Dev Summit 2019 was a hidden gem: the first ever live episode of this podcast! Chet, Romain and Tor took this opportunity to have a chat with Zarah Dominguez and Cyril Mottier. Both Zarah and Cyril work as Android app developers and are known for their presentations at various Android conferences. We talked about modernizing large codebases, Kotlin, data binding, themes & styles, and many other things. Let's not spoil the podcast here. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: ADB Live on YouTube Zarah: @zarahjutz (blog) Cyril: @cyrilmottier (blog) Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Chet, Glen, Rod, and Tor. Il n'y a pas de Romain.  In this episode, Chet and Tor talk with Rod Graves and Glen Murphy from the Android UX team. We talked about various UX changes in Android over the years, as well as UI design in general. For example, Glen compared UX design to API design; trying to provide an interface for the users of your product that helps them build a mental model to better understand how everything fits and works together. Favorite acronym: "WTFY" Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: Rod: @rgraves Glen: @gmurphy Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: Best Practices for Unique Identifers Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Chet and Romain, featuring a complete lack of Tor. In this episode, Chet and Romain talk about talking, speak about speaking, monologue monologuing. We have a conversation about various aspects of giving presentations. Everyone has their own style and techniques, and there are no right answers for giving talks that audiences enjoy. But we all have opinions and techniques that work for us; here are some of ours. We talk about making presentations more engaging, having co-speakers, picking topics, getting practice and experience, choosing events, and all kinds of other random stuff that came up in the conversation. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: Presenting Presenting (article) Top Tips for Terrible Tech Talks (video/presentation) Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Chet, Dustin and Chris In this episode, we chat with Chris Craik and Dustin Lam from the AndroidX team about benchmarking. We cover the new AndroidX benchmarking library, how to use it, and what problems it solves. If you're wondering why Chet totally took over the interview towards the end, it's not that he wouldn't share the stage; Romain and Tor had to leave early and snuck out quietly. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: Benchmarking library documentation Google I/O 2019 Benchmarking talk Blurry action shot from the recording session Chris: @chris_craik Dustin: @itsdustinlam Chet: @chethaase Tor: @tornorbye Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Romain, Anna, and (unfortunately) Chet Chet and Romain spoke with Anna Goldie from the Google Brain team about machine learning. If you ever wondered what the difference is between AI and machine learning or what deep neural networks are, then this episode is for you. To be clear, this show has nothing to do with Android, we just thought it would be an interesting topic. Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly. Links: Google Brain Tensor Flow TensorFlow tutorials Machine Learning on Android ML Kit Chris Olah's blog on ML models Anna: @annadgoldie Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.