Modern Android Development at Android Developer Summit ‘22

Posted by Nick Butcher, Developer Relations Engineer

The Android Developer Summit is back and the first stop on the world tour just finished! We focussed on the latest developments in Modern Android Development: our set of libraries, tools and guidance that make it faster and easier to build amazing Android apps. Here is a recap of the top 3 announcements from the conference.

#1: Jetpack Compose October ‘22

The October ‘22 stable release of Jetpack Compose brings support for staggered grids, snapping behaviors, pull to refresh, drawing text directly to canvas and many bug fixes and performance improvements. It also includes the first stable release of the Compose Material 3 library, helping you to build fresh, beautiful apps with updated components and styling.

We’ve also released a new Gradle BOM to simplify how you specify compose dependencies and launched the first alphas of Compose for Android TV—in our continued efforts to bring the joys of writing Compose UIs to all Android form factors.

#2: Stable Baseline Profile generation

If you haven’t tried them yet, Baseline Profiles are a powerful way to improve app startup and runtime performance—without changing a single line of app code—and we’ve seen them yield up to 40% faster startup times.

With Jetpack Benchmark 1.1 and Android Gradle Plugin 7.3 both reaching stable, the toolchain for generating a profile is now completely stable and ready to integrate into your app and start seeing the speed benefits. See the “Making Apps Blazing Fast with Baseline Profiles” talk for all the details.

#3: Architectural Guidance

A solid app needs a strong architecture and we’ve been bikeshedding on your behalf to provide detailed guidance on building scalable, testable, high quality apps. Check out the talks and new docs on Modularization, State holders & State Production, UI Events, Flow collection, building Offline first apps and more.