Now in Android - a new, open source, real-world sample app

Posted by Paris Hsu, Product & Design, Android and Don Turner, Developer Relations Engineer, Android

The Now in Android app is now on GitHub!

For two years, 'Now in Android' has been a popular blog and YouTube series, providing you with the latest and greatest developer news from the Android team. Starting today, you can check out the alpha version of the Now in Android app on GitHub! 🎉

The app has two goals:

Firstly, it showcases best practices, opinionated designs, and solutions to complex real-world problems which other sample apps don’t handle. It does so with an open source implementation of a real world app.

Secondly, it helps you (the developer) keep up to date with the areas of Android development which interest you most. It is a working app planned for publication on the Play Store.

Now in Android app screen designs

For this first alpha release, the Now in Android app includes:

• UI built using Jetpack Compose
• Theme components with Material3
• Adaptive layouts for different screen sizes
• Architecture that follows our official guidance
• A reactive programming model with unidirectional data flow, implemented using Kotlin Flows
• Room and Proto DataStore for local data storage, offline first
• Remote/local data synchronization scheduled using WorkManager with exponential backoff

As well as these features, we are also documenting the learning journeys we took to certain decisions with the app's design and implementation. Check out our first journey on the app's Architecture here.

The Now in Android screens adapt based on device screen size

Since this is an alpha release, we expect that there will be bugs and missing features, and we would greatly appreciate your feedback. We have some exciting features planned, such as user authentication and loading data from a real backend. We can’t wait for you to check out the app and let us know what you think!

Finally, if you want to learn about the tools we used to build the app and how we target multiple screen sizes, check out these talks from this year's Google I/O:

• Developer Keynote
• Implementing Android apps for all screen sizes