11 Weeks of Android: Jetpack

Posted by Diana Wong, Product Manager, Android Jetpack

This blog post is part of a weekly series for #11WeeksOfAndroid. For each of the #11WeeksOfAndroid, we’re diving into a key area so you don’t miss anything.This week, we spotlighted Jetpack; here’s a look at what you should know.

The big news

In 2018, we launched Android Jetpack as a suite of libraries to help developers follow best practices, reduce boilerplate code, and write code that works consistently across Android versions and devices. We are excited about the growth we’ve seen and the incredible feedback that developers like you have shared with us. 47% of the top 1000 apps use 2 or more Jetpack libraries, not including core libraries like AppCompat or Lifecycle. Our work over the past year has been about making the basics easy for Android developers, so that you can focus on the code you care about. We have released many updates to our existing libraries as well as new libraries to help make building high-quality apps easier.

What to watch

We have also been busy pushing out many updates over the past year!

For an overall look at what’s new in Jetpack, be sure to check out our talk from #Android11 Beta launch:

It’s a quick fly-by introducing many of the updates to our libraries, with pointers on how to get started.

This week, we’ve also done deep dives into major releases like Hilt, including cheat sheets to help you get started, and how we migrated our own samples to use Hilt for dependency injection. Less boilerplate = more fun.

Paging 3.0 is one of our first libraries written Kotlin-first and based on coroutines. The Paging library adds the features you asked for like better error handling, easier list transformations like map or filter, and support for common features like list separators, headers, and footers. We added RxJava, LiveData and ListenableFutures support and backwards compatibility with Paging 2, so it’s easier to migrate.

Using the Camera in your app? CameraX is in Beta and helps developers manage edge cases across different devices and OS versions, so that you don’t have to.

This year, we've made several major improvements with the release of Navigation 2.3, which allows you to navigate between different screens of your app with ease while also allowing you to follow Android UI principles. Let us navigate you through them all here:

Spotlight on Permissions

In Android 11, we continued our work to give users even more control over sensitive permissions. At the same time, it's very important to us that we make it as easy as possible for you as developers to build for Android. With the changes in privacy over the past several releases, Android Jetpack is making it easier for your app to work with Permissions. Now there are type-safe contracts for common intents and more via new ActivityResult APIs. These changes simplify how you request permissions, and we’ll continue to work on making permissions easier in the future. Find out more in this post.

Learning path

Take a look at our new Learning pathway for an easy way to go through all the highlights from this week. It’s an ordered tutorial which guides you through our new content, culminating in a quiz. Bonus: You earn a bright and shiny Jetpack badge to be saved to your Google Developer Profile. In addition to the learning pathway, we’ve also got a new library explorer to make it simple to find more about Jetpack libraries you might be looking for and their latest updates.

Key takeaways

Best practices are baked into Jetpack libraries, giving opinionated guidance to make it easier for you to build a higher-quality Android app. We’ve released new features to Navigation and Workmanager, updates to increase the stability of CameraX, added robustness for Biometrics, and more. We’ve also launched new libraries, like our collaboration with Dagger for Hilt and a new library to help improve app startup. Your feedback is important to us; so give these libraries a shot, tell us what you think, and help us improve them!

Resources

You can find the entire playlist of #11WeeksOfAndroid video content here, and learn more about each week here. We’ll continue to spotlight new areas each week, so keep an eye out and follow us on Twitter and YouTube. Thanks so much for letting us be a part of this experience with you!