Android Developers Blog: September 2022

Outdooractive boosts user experience on wearable devices with 30% less development time using Compose for Wear OS

29 September 2022

Posted by The Android Developers Team

Outdooractive, Europe’s largest outdoor platform, provides trail maps and information to a global community of more than 12 million nature enthusiasts. As a platform focused on helping users plan and navigate their outdoor adventures, Outdooractive has long viewed wearable devices like smart watches as essential to the growth of their app. Users value wearables as navigation tools and activity trackers, so when Google reached out with Android’s new UI toolkit, Compose for Wear OS, Outdooractive’s developers jumped on the opportunity to improve their app for this growing market. The application overhaul quickly showed the benefits of Compose for Wear OS. It cut development time by an estimated 30% for Outdooractive’s developers, accelerating their ability to create streamlined user interfaces. “What would have taken us days now takes us hours,” said Liam Hargreaves, the Senior Project Manager of Outdooractive. Having a modern code base and increasing the development speed helped make the UI code more intuitive for the developers to read and write, allowing for faster prototyping in the design phase and more fluid collaboration. This helped the developers create a more convenient experience for users. Using new tools to create an improved user experience Outdooractive’s app strives to deliver accurate information in real time to the users’ wearable devices, including turn-by-turn navigation, trail conditions, and weather updates. “Our app has a relatively complex set of interactions,” said Liam. “Each of these needs to be kept simple, quick, easy to access, and clearly presented — all whilst our customer could be standing on a hillside or in a storm or wearing winter hiking gear and gloves!” New features in Compose for Wear OS helped the Outdooractive developers create a higher quality app experience for users on the go. The Chip component significantly improved the process for creating lists and allowed developers to use pre-built design elements, saving the team days of work. ScalingLazyColumn also optimized the creation of scrolling screens without the need for RecyclerView or ScrollView. The developers were also excited by how easy it was to use the AnimatedVisibility component because it allowed them to animate functions that they previously didn’t have time for. The team especially appreciated how Compose for Wear OS made it much easier to present different UI states to the user by communicating “loading” or “error” conditions more clearly.

"Compose makes the UI code more intuitive to write and read, allowing us to prototype faster in the design phase and also collaborate better on the code."

Experimentation without the overhead Since implementing Compose for Wear OS, Outdooractive’s users have spent more time on wearable devices doing things they normally would have done on their phones, such as navigating hiking routes — a key UI goal that Compose for Wear OS helped the developers to achieve. “We see wearables as a critical part of our product and market strategy — and the reaction from our users is extremely positive,” Liam said. Outdooractive’s developers used another Android Wear OS capability called Health Services to implement fitness tracking features such as heart rate monitoring into the app by leveraging on-device sensors to offer an experience unique to wearable devices. Health Services on Wear OS automizes the configuration of all health- and fitness-related sensors; collects their data; and calculates metrics such as heart rate, distance traveled, and pace, making it easy for developers to implement sophisticated app features while also maximizing battery life. With Health Services and Compose for Wear OS, Outdooractive’s developers plan to further expand the app’s offerings that are made possible by body sensors. Outdooractive’s streamlined process shows just how easy Compose for Wear OS makes application development because it gives developers the flexibility to experiment with different layouts without increasing development overhead. Liam had clear advice for other developers considering using Compose for Wear OS: “Fully embrace it.” Boost your wearable app’s capabilities Jetpack Compose for Wear OS helps build more engaging user experiences for wearable devices. To get a first look, watch the Wear OS talk from Google I/O or try the Compose for Wear OS codelab to start learning now.

Listen to our major Text to Speech upgrades for 64 bit devices.

28 September 2022

Posted by Rakesh Iyer, Staff Software Engineer and Leland Rechis, Group Product Manager

We are upgrading the Speech Services by Google speech engine in a big way, providing clearer, more natural voices. All 421 voices in 67 languages have been upgraded with a new voice model and synthesizer. If you already use TTS and the Speech Services by Google engine, there is nothing to do – everything will happen behind the scenes as your users will have automatically downloaded the latest update. We’ve seen a significant side by side quality increase with this change, particularly in respects to clarity and naturalness. With this upgrade we will also be changing the default voice in en-US to one that is built using fresher speaker data, which alongside our new stack, results in a drastic improvement. If your users have not selected a system voice, and you rely on system defaults, they will hear a slightly different speaker. You can hear the difference below Speaker change and upgrade for EN-US

Sample Current Speaker	Sample Upgraded Speaker

Speaker upgrades in a few other languages

Current	Upgraded
HI-IN	HI-IN

PT-BR	PT-BR

ES-US	ES-US

This update will be rolling out to all 64 bit Android devices via the Google Play Store over the next few weeks as a part of the Speech Services by Google apk. If you are concerned your users have not updated this yet, you can check for the minimum version code ,210390644 on the package com.google.android.tts.If you haven't used TTS in your projects yet, or haven’t given your users the ability to choose a voice within your app, it's fairly straightforward, and easy to experiment with. We’ve included some sample code to get you started. Here’s an example of how to set up voice synthesis, get a list of voices, and set a specific voice. We finally send a simple utterance to the synthesizer.

class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity() {
companion object {
private const val TAG = "TextToSpeechSample"
}
private lateinit var tts: TextToSpeech
private val progressListener: UtteranceProgressListener = object : UtteranceProgressListener() {
override fun onStart(utteranceId: String) {
Log.d(TAG, "Started utterance $utteranceId")
}
override fun onDone(utteranceId: String) {
Log.d(TAG, "Done with utterance $utteranceId")
}
override fun onError(utteranceId: String?) {}
}
override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
setContentView(R.layout.activity_main)
val onInitListener = TextToSpeech.OnInitListener {
tts.setOnUtteranceProgressListener(progressListener)
tts.voice = tts.voices.find { it.name == "en-us-x-iog-local" } ?: tts.defaultVoice
tts.speak("1 2 3", TextToSpeech.QUEUE_ADD, Bundle(), "utteranceId")
}
tts = TextToSpeech(this, onInitListener)
}
override fun onDestroy() {
tts.shutdown()
super.onDestroy()
}
}

We are excited to see this upgraded experience in your app!

Optimize for Android Go : Lessons from Google apps Part 2

28 September 2022

Posted by Niharika Arora, Developer Relations Engineer

Building for Android Go involves paying special attention to performance optimizations and resource usage. In part-1 of this blog, we discussed why developers should consider building for Android Go, some tips on optimizing the app memory and identified the standard approach to follow while fixing performance issues. In this blog, we will talk about the other vitals to pay attention to while building apps for Android Go. Optimize your apps for Android GoImprove startup latency Improving app startup time requires a deep understanding of things that affect it.

Avoid eager initialization: Avoid doing eager work that may not be needed in your app’s startup sequence. The user launching your app is the most well-known reason a process starts, but WorkManager, JobScheduler, BroadcastReceiver, bound Services, and ContentProviders can also start your app process in the background. Avoid initializing things eagerly in your Application class like ContentProviders, or androidx initializers if possible (If they are not needed for any possible reason for your app process to start).

Move the tasks from UI thread to background thread

Identify operations which occupy large time frames and can be optimized.
Identify operations that consume more time than expected.
Identify operations which cause the main thread to be blocked.

If there are tasks which are taking longer and blocking the main thread, try to move them to a background thread or prefer using WorkManager.

Check third party library initialization

Lazy load third party libraries. A lot of libraries do have on demand initialization or disabling auto init options.

Check rendering time of webp / png images

Prefer webp images over jpg/png
Prefer svg for small icons.
Check if any layouts are invisible, but still spend time for the images to be loaded.
Explore using a low resolution image according to the memory capabilities of the device.
Remove unnecessary backgrounds/alpha from views.

Avoid synchronous IPCs on UI thread: Check for binder transactions keeping the main thread busy: Often there are multiple Inter process communication happening within the app. These could be anything like image / asset loading, third party libs loading, heavy work on application’s main thread like disk or network access etc. StrictMode is a useful developer tool to detect such accident usage.

Identify and measure these transactions to understand :

How much time does this take and if it is expected & necessary ?
Is the main thread sleeping / idle / blocked during this time ? If yes, this could be a performance bottleneck.
Can this be delayed ?

Wisely use XML and Json parsing: The Gboard app optimized file list parsing by using Java code instead of XML parsing as they were parsing them out into memory as Java objects at runtime. So, GBoard did a work to convert all the XML into Java code at compile time, the latency then become time of class loading, which is much more faster, almost ⅕ of previous. Benchmarking both XML and Json parsing for your app to identify the appropriate library to be used.

Analyze and fix severe disk read contention: To capture this, use StrictMode in your development environment.
- Detects accidental disk or network access on the application's main thread, where UI operations are received and animations take place.

Can automatically terminate the app (or log it to logcat), when a violation has occurred by adding different penalties.

Optimize app size

Users often avoid downloading apps that seem too large, particularly in emerging markets where devices connect to spotty 2G and 3G networks with low bandwidth speed or work on pay-by-the-byte plans.

Remove unnecessary layouts: Gboard and Camera from Google teams validated the layouts which were unused or could be merged with small UI changes and removed the unnecessary layouts reducing overall app code size.

Migrate to dynamic layouts/views when appropriate: The apps deep dive and find out the layouts and views which can be dynamically rendered. They used merge and viewstub to further optimize their views and layouts.

Revaluate features with low DAU. Try to disable features which take more memory and make the app less performant: The team further analyzed their apps to specifically optimize for Android Go and disabled features on go devices which were not of much usage but were taking a lot of memory. They removed complex animations, large GIFs etc. to make space for parts of the app.

Try combine native binaries with common dependencies into one: If the app has different JNI implementations with a lot of common underlying dependencies - all the different binaries add up to the apk size with redundant components. Camera from Google app benefited from combining several JNI binaries into a single JNI binary while keeping the Java and JNI files separate. This helped the app reduce the apk size by several Mbs.

Try to reduce dalvik code size: Check for code that is never used at runtime, eg) large classes and auto-generated code.
- Code optimizers like ProGuard () could help optimize and shrink code size, but they can't deal with codes guarded by runtime-constants. Replacing the check/flags with compile-time constants to make most usage of the optimization tools.

Reduce translatable strings size :

a. Don’t translate internal-only UI strings. Mark them as translatable = “false”.

b. Remove unused alternative resources: You can use the Android Gradle plugin's resConfigs property to remove alternative resource files that your app does not need. if you are using a library that includes language resources (such as AppCompat or Google Play Services), then your app includes all translated language strings for the messages in those libraries whether the rest of your app is translated to the same languages or not. If you'd like to keep only the languages that your app officially supports, you can specify those languages using the resConfig property. Any resources for languages not specified are removed.

The following snippet shows how to limit your language resources to just English and French

android {
defaultConfig {
...
resConfigs "en", "fr"
}
}

You can read more here.

c. Don’t translate what doesn’t need translation: If the string does not participate in a UI, it should not be translated. Strings for the purpose of debugging, exception messages, URLs and so on should be string literals in code, not resources.

i. Don’t translate what’s not shown to the user anyway

It’s possible to have a String resource that’s practically never shown to the user, but is still strongly referenced. One example is in your <activity>, if you have an android:label set and referencing a String resource but the Activity’s label is never actually shown (e.g. it’s not a launcher Activity and it doesn’t have an app bar that shows its own label).

d. Don’t translate URLs: Consider this example:

This device doesn\'t support Android Auto.\n

<a href="https://support.google.com/androidauto/answer/6395843">Learn more</a>

</string>

You may recognize < and > - these are escape characters for “<” and “>”. They’re needed here because if you were to put an <a> tag inside a <string> tag, then the Android resource compiler would just drop them (as it does with all tags it doesn’t recognize).

However, this means that you’re translating the HTML tags and the URL to 78 languages. Totally unnecessary.

Instead, remove the part with HTML:

This device doesn\'t support Android Auto.

</string>

Note we don’t define a separate string for “Learn more”, because it’s a common string. To produce the HTML snippet for the link, we define "<a href="https://support.google.com/androidauto/answer/6395843>%s</a>" as a string literals in code, and then drop the value of “Learn more” from resources into the format specifier.

e. Inline untranslated strings: By specifying strings in strings.xml you can leverage the Android framework to automatically change the actual value used at runtime based on the current configuration (e.g. based on the current locale, show a localized value for the string).

f. Remove duplicate strings: If you have the same string multiple times as a literal in code (“Hello World”), it will be shared across all instances. But resources don’t work this way - if you have an identical string under a different name then unless both are translated identically across 78 languages (unlikely) you’ll end up with duplicates.

Don’t have duplicate strings!

g. Don’t have separate strings for ALL CAPS or Title Case: Android has built-in support for case mutations.

Use android:capitalize (since API level 1). If set, specifies that this TextView has a textual input method and should automatically capitalize what the user types. The default is "none".

Reducing asset size: Be mindful of different target device form factors that your app supports and adjust your assets accordingly.

Upload your app with Android app bundles: The easiest way to gain immediate app size savings when publishing to Google Play is by uploading your app as an Android App Bundle, which is a new upload format that includes all your app’s compiled code and resources, but defers APK generation and signing to Google Play. Read more here.

Utilize dynamic delivery feature if applicable: Play Feature Delivery uses advanced capabilities of app bundles, allowing certain features of your app to be delivered conditionally or downloaded on demand. You can use feature modules for custom delivery. A unique benefit of feature modules is the ability to customize how and when different features of your app are downloaded onto devices running Android 5.0 (API level 21) or higher. Learn more here.

Recap

This part of the blog captures some best practices, recommendations and learnings from Google apps to optimize your app size, startup latency and improve go app experience that helps drive user engagement and adoption for your Android app. In part-3, you will get to know the tools that helped the Google apps identify and fix such performance issues in their app!

Optimize for Android (Go edition): Lessons from Google apps – Part 1
Optimize for Android Go : Lessons from Google apps – Part 2
Optimize for Android Go: Lessons from Google apps – Part 3 (coming soon)

Helping users discover apps for all their devices from their phone

27 September 2022

Posted by Marcus Leal, Product Manager, Google Play Over the years, Android has evolved to support more devices such as watches, tablets, TVs, and even cars. Apps and games are a critical part of this ecosystem as they power many of the unique digital experiences that we all enjoy and rely on. As a way to make it easier for users to find your great apps across all Android devices, we are making changes to the Google Play Store, enabling users to more easily discover and install apps on other devices directly from their phone. Updates to the Google Play Store phone app We recently introduced three updates to the Play Store phone app that will help your users’ devices work better together: homepages for non-phone devices, a device search filter, and the ability to remotely install an app to another device. Homepages for other devices Users with a Wear OS watch, Android TV OS, or car with Android Automotive can navigate to the Play Store “Other devices” page on their phone app to see app and game recommendations, and editorials tailored to their non-phone devices.

Users can go to the “Other devices” page to get recommendations of apps and games optimized for non-phone devices.

Search device filtersUsers can also find apps and games for their devices with the new device filter on the Play Store search page. Using the filter, the search results will only include apps and games that are compatible with their selected device.

Users can use the device filters to easily find apps and games optimized for their Wear watch, Android TV, or Android Auto-enabled devices.

Remote install to other devices

Users can remotely install apps and games to their other devices from the Play Store on their phone.

Changes to the Play Store websitePlay Store website

Users can access the Play Store website on their computer or non-Android phone to browse, search, and remotely install your apps and games to their Android devices.

These changes were designed to give developers new opportunities to showcase their multi-device app experiences, driving more engagement across the Android ecosystem.

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Just launched: Apply for support from Google Play’s $2M Indie Games Fund in Latin America

22 September 2022

Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Global Developer Marketing

announced
Today, we are launching the Indie Games Fund in Latin America. We will be awarding $2 million dollars in non-dilutive cash awards, in addition to hands-on support, to selected small games studios based in LATAM, to help them build and grow their businesses on Google Play.

The program is open to indie game developers who have already launched a game - whether it’s on Google Play or another mobile platform, PC or console. Each selected recipient will get between $150,000 and $200,000 dollars to help them take their game to the next level, and build successful businesses.

Check out all eligibility criteria and apply now. Priority will be given to applications received by 12:00 p.m. BRT, 31 October, 2022.

For more updates about all our programs, resources and tools for indie game developers, follow us on Twitter @GooglePlayBiz and Google Play business community on LinkedIn.

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Android Studio Dolphin

15 September 2022

Posted by Yuri Blaise, Product Manager, Android

Jetpack ComposeWear OSWear OS 3 devicesdownloadDevelopment tools

Intellij 2021.3 Platform Update - Android Studio Dolphin includes the Intellij 2021.3 release, which has features such as an improved Find Usages flow, Kotlin debugger updates, constant conditions inspection for Kotlin, improved code intentions previews and more. Learn More.

Gradle Managed Virtual Devices - If you've wanted to automate your app testing using emulators, but found it cumbersome to coordinate, and setup, then Gradle Managed Virtual Devices is for you. Just describe the virtual devices you need for your automated tests as a part of your build, and let Gradle take care of the rest. From SDK downloading, to device provisioning and setup, to test execution and teardown, Gradle manages the lifecycle of your virtual devices during instrumentation tests. Gradle further optimizes your test execution with new features that enable snapshot management, test caching, and test sharding to ensure your tests run efficiently, quickly, and consistently.

Gradle Managed Virtual Devices also introduces a completely new type of device, called the Automated Test Device, which is optimized for automated tests, resulting in significant reduction in CPU and memory usage during test execution. Learn more.

Gradle Managed Virtual Devices

Jetpack Compose

Compose Animation Inspector - You can now see all supported animations at once and coordinate them with the Animation Preview inspector. You can also freeze a specific animation or scrub through an entire animation frame-by-frame. Animation Preview currently supports animations built with updateTransition and AnimatedVisibility.

Compose Animation Inspector

Compose Multipreview Annotations - Instead of copying and pasting the same @Preview code everywhere across your app, you can define an annotation class that includes multiple preview definitions; that new annotation generates all those previews at once, allowing you to preview multiple devices, fonts, and themes at the same time without repeating those definitions for every single composable. Learn more.

Multipreview annotations

Compose Recomposition Counts in Layout Inspector - To help debug your Jetpack Compose UI, you can now view recomposition counts for a Compose app in the Layout Inspector. With this tool, you can understand if your UI is updating too often, or just as you expect. For easier usage, recomposition counts and skip counts can optionally be shown in the Component Tree and Attributes panels. Learn more.

Compose Recomposition Counts

Wear OS

Wear OS Emulator Pairing Assistant - the Wear OS Emulator Pairing Assistant allows you to see Wear OS devices in the Device Manager, pairing one or more watch emulators with a single phone without having to navigate through multiple ADB commands and device combinations. As a bonus, you also don't have to re-pair devices as often because Android Studio remembers pairings after it closes. Learn more.

Wear OS Emulator Pairing Assistant

Wear OS Emulator Toolbar - The Android Emulator toolbar now has new buttons and interactions that align to Wear OS physical devices; use it to trigger actions such as the palm gesture or to simulate tilting the device. To learn more, see common actions in the emulator.

Wear OS Emulator Side Toolbar

Wear OS Direct Surface Launch - When deploying your WearOS app, it can be tricky at times to get your app to the right state, especially if you are working on features like Watch Face complications. With Android Studio Dolphin, you can create Run/Debug configurations for Wear OS tiles, watch faces, and complications that can be launched directly from Android Studio. Learn more.

New Wear OS Run/Debug configuration types

To recap, Android Studio Dolphin includes these new enhancements and features:

Development Tools

Intellij 2021.3 Platform Update
Gradle Managed Virtual Devices

Jetpack Compose Tools

Compose Animation Inspector
Compose MultiPreview Annotations
Compose Recomposition Counts in Layout Inspector

WearOS

Wear OS Emulator Pairing Assistant
Wear OS Emulator Toolbar
Wear OS Direct Surface Launch

Check out the Android Studio release notes, Android Gradle plugin release notes, and the Android Emulator release notes for more details.

Getting Started

Download

Download the latest version of Android Studio Dolphin from the download page. If you are using a previous release of Android Studio, you can simply update to the latest version of Android Studio. If you want to maintain a stable version of Android Studio, you can run the stable release version and canary release versions of Android Studio at the same time. Learn more.

To use the mentioned Android Emulator features make sure you are running at least Android Emulator v31.3.0 downloaded via the Android Studio SDK Manager.

We appreciate any feedback on things you like, and issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug or issue, feel free to file an issue. Follow us -- the Android Studio development team on Twitter and on Medium.

Outdooractive boosts user experience on wearable devices with 30% less development time using Compose for Wear OS

Listen to our major Text to Speech upgrades for 64 bit devices.

Optimize for Android Go : Lessons from Google apps Part 2

Helping users discover apps for all their devices from their phone

Just launched: Apply for support from Google Play’s $2M Indie Games Fund in Latin America

Android Studio Dolphin

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