#TheAndroidShow: Faster and easier to build excellent apps, across devices.

Posted by Anirudh Dewani, Director of Android Developer Relations

We just wrapped another episode of #TheAndroidShow; in the show, we covered the latest in Android development, including a look at the new Pixel watch and the world of wearables, gathered the team to demo tools and libraries to build for foldables, large screen devices, with Compose, Android 14, Studio Bot, and more. Take a look, and here’s a recap of some of the ways we’re helping make it faster and easier to build excellent apps, across devices:

Studio Bot: improving your productivity, through Generative AI

At Google I/O we gave you a preview of Studio Bot, an AI powered coding assistant that is tightly integrated into Android Studio, designed to make Android development faster and easier. Last month, Studio Bot expanded into over 170 countries, and today we’re adding even more functionality in the latest canary release to help you be more productive. AI code completion enables you to receive suggestions for more complex code completions, such as multiline code or even entire functions. You can also now add comments to your code, and document code with just a click using Studio Bot. We caught up with Jamal Eason to learn about the investments the team is working on, including our improvements in quality.

Faster and easier to build, with Jetpack Compose

Jetpack Compose gives you powerful and intuitive APIs, which make it faster and easier to build UIs. Since Google I/O, we’ve been working on improving performance across Compose to make it even more helpful. Developers around the world are taking advantage of Compose to help them rewrite screens, build new screens, or create new apps. For example, The Reddit team adopted Compose for their design system, which improved their code flexibility and reduced code duplication. They rewrote several features in Compose and their new tech stack, one of them being Reddit Recap, with beautiful animations. They were able to achieve feature parity with 44% less code when they rewrote it using Compose, saving engineering resources and time.

Build across devices, with large screens

Foldables and tablets are an important space - and the market for large screens is growing with Samsung announcing that half of their users are thinking of making a foldable their next phone. We’re continuing to build tools and libraries to make it easier to build for different device types, including device streaming and new drag and drop APIs in Compose. See how Zoom saw 2x higher user engagement and optimized their app for large screens, and get started with making your app work better across screen sizes and form factors.

The latest in wearables, with Wear OS 4 and Pixel Watch 2

Earlier this month, we saw the launch of Google Pixel Watch 2 - the first Google watch with all the capabilities of Wear OS 4! The latest version of Wear OS offers several capabilities that make it easier to develop exceptional wearable experiences, from Watch Face Format to enhanced tiles and more. Read more to discover the latest updates to Wear OS and how you can get started!

Making excellent, premium apps

Earlier this month, Android 14 started rolling out to users around the world. So there’s no better time to start optimizing your apps for the release and taking advantage of new features in Android 14 to help you build excellent experiences for your users using the best of Android, such as improved camera functionality with UltraHDR, seamless authentication with Credential Manager and enhanced widget development with Jetpack Glance. In the show, we saw how Snapchat used Camera2 Extension API to build camera features such as night mode, zoom, and tap-to-focus, enhancing their user’s experience capturing high-quality Snaps on Android devices, and also had a conversation with Dave Burke about Android 14 and more. Take a look!

Connecting with you at events around the world

This year, we're excited to bring the Android team and our Android Google Developer Expert friends to events around the world, you can learn more about it here. Later this month, the Android team will be at Droidcon London (October 26-27), bringing talks and hosting office hours around many exciting topics, and a panel of subject matter experts. Android GDEs will be speaking at 100+ DevFest events around the world, with special appearances from the Android team at DevFests in New York, the Bay Area, London, and Singapore among others. We look forward to connecting with thousands of you in person!

Missed the show? You can watch it here, or check out the full playlist here. This is your conversation with the broader Android community, and if you’ve got an idea for the next show, we’d love to hear it - send us a Tweet, or share a message in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!