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18 May 2021
Posted by Florina Muntenescu, Android Developer Advocate
Android Jetpack is a suite of libraries, tools, and guidance to help developers follow best practices, reduce boilerplate code, and write code that works consistently across Android versions and devices. Today, 84% of the top 1000 apps on Google Play rely on Jetpack.
Here’s a round-up of the latest updates in Jetpack - an extended version of our What’s new in Jetpack talk!
The CameraX library provides a unified API surface for accessing camera functionality across OS versions, including device-specific compatibility fixes and workarounds. Some of the latest improvements to the library address common feature requests, including support for adjusting exposure compensation and access to more detailed information about camera state and features. Additionally, camera settings like FPS range can now be changed via Camera2Interop while the camera is running. The library also brings support for the latest device and OS features, including high-dynamic-range preview, zoom ratio controls, and support for Android’s Do Not Disturb mode. Perhaps most importantly, though, the library has continued to address performance, resulting in faster image capture and faster initialization, especially on older devices.
Hilt is Jetpack’s recommended dependency injection solution built on top of Dagger. As part of the transition to stable, Hilt’s ViewModel support has moved up into the core Hilt Android APIs and SavedStateHandle has been added as a default dependency available in the ViewModelComponent. Also, Hilt is now integrated with Navigation and Compose: you can obtain an annotated Hilt ViewModel that is scoped to a destination or the navigation graph itself. Developers have already started using Hilt in their apps. Read about their experience in this blog post.
The Paging library allows you to load and display small chunks of data to improve
network and system resource consumption. This release features a complete rewrite in Kotlin with first-class support for coroutines and Flow, asynchronous loading with RxJava and Guava primitives, and overall improvements to the repository and presentation layers.
The 3.0 release is a substantial improvement in usability over Paging 2, and the rewrite was planned with partial and staged migrations in mind so that developers can transition on their own schedules. Check out the Paging 3.0 documentation and the Paging 3.0 codelab for details and hands-on experience.
ConstraintLayout and MotionLayout
ConstraintLayout, Jetpack’s flexible system for designing layouts, and MotionLayout, an API aimed at managing motion and widget animation, are now stable. MotionLayout now includes support for foldable devices, image filters, and motion effects. To find out more about what’s new in design tools, check out this Google I/O talk.
The Security Crypto library allows you to safely and easily encrypt files and SharedPreferences. To encrypt SharedPreferences, create an EncryptedSharedPreferences object with the appropriate key and scheme and then use it like a standard SharedPreferences object.
val prefs: SharedPreferences = EncryptedSharedPreferences.create(
context,
"prefs_file_name",
mainKey,
prefKeyEncryptionScheme = AES256_SIV,
prefValueEncryptionScheme = AES256_GCM,
)
// Use the resulting SharedPreferences object as usual.
prefs.edit()
.putBoolean("show_completed", true)
.apply()
Fragment
Over the past year, the Fragment library has undergone a major effort to clean up its internal implementation and reduce undocumented behavior, making it easier for developers to follow best practices in their apps and write reliable tests. This lays the groundwork for future improvements to the library, like supporting multiple back stacks in Navigation, and it may require some work to accommodate strict enforcement of API contracts. In practice, you should pay careful attention to your tests after updating the library. Check out the Fragment release notes to see specific cases to watch out for.
Recent releases have also introduced ActivityResult integration, making it possible to register for Activity results from a fragment. Fragment has also added a new FragmentOnAttachListener interface to replace the less-flexible onAttachFragment method. Existing code that overrides this method in Fragment or FragmentActivity will still work, but we’ve deprecated onAttachFragment to help prevent new code from accidentally adopting a less-flexible approach.
// Obtain the fragment manager. May be a childFragmentManager,
// if in a fragment, to observe child attachment.
val fm = supportFragmentManager
val listener = FragmentOnAttachListener {
fragmentManager, fragment ->
// Respond to the fragment being attached.
}
fm.addFragmentOnAttachListener(listener)
Once a library is feature complete it moves to Beta for stabilization. At this moment, the APIs change only in response to critical issues or community feedback.
DataStoreDataStore provides a robust data storage solution that addresses the shortcomings of SharedPreferences while maintaining a simple, highly usable API surface. DataStore brings support for best practices like Kotlin coroutines with Flow and RxJava. DataStore allows you to store key-value pairs, via Preference DataStore or typed objects backed by protocol buffers, via Proto DataStore. You can also plug in your own serialization solution, like Kotlin Serialization.
Alpha libraries are libraries under active development—APIs may be added, changed, or removed, but what’s in the library is tested and should be highly functional.
AppSearchAppSearch is a new on-device search library which provides high performance and feature-rich full-text search functionality. Compared to SQLite, AppSearch supports multiple world languages, simplifies ranking query results, and offers lower latency for indexing and searching over large datasets.
AppSearch 1.0.0-alpha01 is released with LocalStorage support, which allows your application to manage structured data, called “documents”, and then query over it. Your application defines what the structure looks like using “schema types”. For instance, you can model a Message as a schema type with data such as subject, body, and sender.
Use builders to create documents of a schema type and then add them to storage. Querying for “body:fruit” will retrieve all documents with the term “fruit” in the body of the Message.
In Android S, AppSearch will also offer PlatformStorage so you can share your application’s data with other applications securely, and reduce your application’s binary size by not having to link additional native libraries. This is currently not available in Jetpack because the library doesn’t target the Android S SDK yet.
Centralized storage on Android S+ for integrating into device-wide search
Room is the recommended data persistence layer, providing increased usability and safety over the platform.
Room 2.4.0-alpha brings support for auto-migrations. When your database schema changes, you now declare an @AutoMigration and indicate from which version to which version you want to migrate, and Room generates the migrations for you. For more complex migrations, you can still use the Migration class:
@Database(
- version = 1,
+ version = 2,
entities = { Doggos.class },
+ autoMigrations = {
+ @AutoMigration (from = 1, to = 2)
+ }
)
public abstract class DoggosDatabase extends RoomDatabase { }
Room 2.3.0 stable version brings experimental support for Kotlin Symbol Processing which, in our benchmarks of Kotlin code showed a 2x speed improvement over KAPT, as well as built-in support for enums and RxJava3.
Room has also introduced a QueryCallback class—which provides a callback when SQLite statements are executed, to simplify tasks like logging—as well as the new @ProvidedTypeConverter annotation, which allows more flexibility when creating type converters.
The WorkManager library—Android’s recommended way to schedule deferrable, asynchronous tasks that run even if the app exits or the device restarts—has made improvements to reliability with task reconciliation, ensuring all tasks are executed, and a variety of workarounds for specific Android OS versions.
The latest versions of WorkManager feature improved support for multi-process apps, including performance benefits from unifying work request scheduling to a single process and limiting database growth when scheduling many requests.
Version 2.7—now in alpha, which is targeted to the Android S SDK—provides additional support for the platform’s new foreground restrictions. See the Effective Background Tasks on Android talk for more details.
The Background Tasks Inspector is available in Android Studio Arctic Fox, allowing you to easily view and debug WorkManager jobs when using the latest versions of the library:
Background Tasks Inspector
The Navigation library, Jetpack’s framework for moving between destinations in an app, now provides support for multiple backstacks and simplifies cases where destinations sit at the same depth, such as a bottom navigation bar.
MacrobenchmarkThe Macrobenchmark library extends Jetpack’s benchmarking coverage to app startup and integrated behaviors like scrolling performance. The library can be used remotely to track metrics in continuous integration testing or locally with profiling results viewable from Android Studio. Check out the Google I/O talk on all the details:
For developers who’d like to integrate more closely with Google Assistant, the Google Shortcuts library provides a way to expose actions to Google Assistant and other Google Services through the existing ShortcutInfo class.
You can send up to fifteen shortcuts at a time through the ShortcutManager to be shown on Google Assistant, among other services, making them available for voice and other interactions.
To implement this, define a shortcut with an Intent and a capability binding; this binding provides semantically-meaningful information that will help Google services figure out the best way to surface it to users.
// expose a "Cappuccino" action to Google Assistant and other services
ShortcutInfoCompat siCompat =
ShortcutInfoCompat.Builder(ctx, "id_cappuccino")
.setShortLabel("Cappuccino")
.setIntent(Intent(ctx, OrderCappuccino::class.java))
.addCapabilityBinding(
"actions.intent.ORDER_MENU_ITEM",
"menuItem.name",
asList("cappuccino")
)
.build()
ShortcutManagerCompat.pushDynamicShortcut(ctx, siCompat)
EmojiCompat
All user-generated content in your app contains 🎉, and supporting modern emoji is a key part of making your app ✨! The EmojiCompat library, which supports modern emoji on API 19 and higher, has moved to a new artifact :emoji2:emoji2, which replaces the previous :emoji:emoji artifact. The new emoji2 library adds 🪄 automatic configuration using the AppStartup library (you don't have to add any code 👩🏿💻 to display 🐻❄️)!
AppCompat adds emoji2 starting with AppCompat 1.4. If your app uses AppCompat, users will see modern emoji ⭐ without any further configuration. Apps that aren't using AppCompat can add :emoji2:emoji2-views. For custom TextViews, you can support modern emoji by using the helpers in :emoji2:emoji2-views-helpers or by subclassing AppCompat views.
Jetpack Compose is Android’s modern toolkit for building native UI. It simplifies and accelerates UI development on Android. Jetpack Compose is currently in beta, and planned to go stable in July. Many of the libraries listed here, as well as others that you might already be using, have introduced features specifically for integration with Jetpack Compose. Ranging from Activity to ViewModel, Navigation, or Hilt, all of these libraries can make adopting Compose in your app smoother. Find out more about about how to use them from this Google I/O talk:
Jetpack makes it easier to work with different form factors, including foldables, large screen devices, and Wear devices. We've introduced new guidelines for large screen development along with improvements to Jetpack libraries such as WindowManager and SlidingPaneLayout. Read all the details in this blog post.
This was a (relatively) quick overview of what’s new in Jetpack. Check out the AndroidX release notes for all the update details of each library and the Google I/O talks for more information on some of them.
Android Developers
Google Play
