Spotlight Week: Android Camera and Media

Posted by Caren Chang- Android Developer Relations Engineer

Android offers Camera and Media APIs to help you build apps that can capture, edit, share, and play media. To help you enhance Android Camera and Media experiences to be even more delightful for your users, this week we will be kicking off the Camera and Media Spotlight week.

This Spotlight Week will provide resources—blog posts, videos, sample code, and more—all designed to help you uplevel the media experiences in your app. Check out highlights from the latest releases in Camera and Media APIs, including better Jetpack Compose support in CameraX, motion photo support in Media3 Transformer, simpler ExoPlayer setup, and much more! We’ll also bring in developers from the community to talk about their experiences building Android camera and media apps.

Here’s what we’re covering during Camera and Media Spotlight week:

What’s new in camera and media

Tuesday, January 7

Check out what’s new in the latest CameraX and Media3 releases, including how to get started with building Camera apps with Compose.

Creating delightful and premium experiences

Wednesday, January 8

Building delightful and premium experiences for your users is what can help your app really stand out. Learn about different ways to achieve this such as utilizing the Media Performance Class or enabling HDR video capture in your app. Hear from developers like Google Drive that enabled Ultra HDR images in their Android app, and Instagram, who improved the in-app image capture experience by implementing Night Mode.

Adaptive for camera and media, for large screens and now XR!

Thursday, January 9

Thinking adaptive is important, so your app works just as well on phones as it does large screens, like foldables, tablets, ChromeOS, cars, and the new Android XR platform, as announced last week! On Wednesday, we’ll be diving into the media experience on large screen devices, and how you can build in a smooth tabletop mode for your camera applications. Prepare your apps for XR devices by considering Spatial Audio and Video.

Media creation

Friday, January 10

Capturing, editing, and processing media content are fundamental features of the Android ecosystem. Learn about how Media3’s Transformer module can help your app’s media processing use cases, and see case studies of apps that are using Transformer in production. Listen in to how the 1 Second Everyday Android app approaches media use cases, and check out a new API that allows apps to capture concurrent camera streams.

These are just some of the things to think about when building camera and media experiences in your app. Keep checking this blog post for updates; we’ll be adding links and more throughout the week.