UPDATED 13:00 EDT / OCTOBER 27 2021

APPS

With Android 12L, Dev Summit focuses on building apps across devices

Google LLC’s Android Dev Summit 2021 today is all about enabling developers to build better apps across devices.

To begin, the Android team is expanding its collection of development tools by bringing Material You — which launched with Android 12 – to Jetpack Compose. And Jetpack itself is getting jam-packed with new features that developers have been clamoring for.

A new operating system optimization feature for Android 12 called 12L that’s designed specifically for large screens was also announced to make it work better for tablets, Chromebooks and foldables. Smaller form factors also got some love with Wear OS updates in Jetpack Compose.

Material You comes to Jetpack Compose

Material You is a set of design updates that launched with Android 12 that delivers an adaptive user interface on Android devices. The Android team has now brought its capabilities into Jetpack Compose, a developer toolkit for building native UIs.

With this integration, developers will be able to access Material You’s personalization features with the first alpha build of Compose Material 3, which offers Material Design 3 components and themes. It also comes with an updated Material Theme Builder tool that helps developers visualize how dynamically extracted colors will appear in their app.

The new Material Theme builder is available as a Figma plugin and a web tool, which is available today.

The Android team is also releasing the first beta version of Jetpack Compose 1.1 with features such as stretch overscroll for Android 12, improved touch-target sizing, experimental lazy layout animations and more. All this is aimed at allowing developers to design for more screen sizes and form factors.

Jetpack gets more features

Jetpack itself is getting even more features developers have been asking for.

For example, Navigation has added multiple backstacks support. WorkManager, the recommended solution for persistent work, which makes it easier to handle Android 12 background processes, added support for expedited jobs. Room adds auto-migration and multi-map relations. DataStore, the replacement for SharedPreferences, reaches version 1.0. And Macrobenchmark, a tool to measure and improve startup, adds simplified frame timing and compatibility.

Introducing 12L, an OS designed for large screens

According to Google, there are a lot of large-screen devices running on Android – more than 250 million – and as a result, the Android team is looking to increase support for those devices with “12L.”

12L is a special feature drop for Android 12 that optimizes for these large screens and provides a new set of tools to make multitasking more powerful and intuitive and improve compatibility support for apps.

The refinements include UI changes that allow large screens those above 600dp, to take advantage of a new two-column layout. This includes the notification shade, lockscreen and other system surfaces. System apps have also been optimized.

In 12L there is also a new taskbar that lets users instantly switch between apps on the fly. It makes split-screen mode more accessible than ever, since users need only drag and drop from the taskbar to run apps in split-screen mode.

Google plans to launch 12L early next year in step with the next wave of Android 12 tablets and foldables. Developers can try out the new features today as part of the 12L developer preview.

Wear OS gets Jetpack Compose support

The Android team is now bringing Compose support to Wear OS with a developer preview. It includes new samples and documentation that will help developers get started.

Tiles API is now in beta, which provides predictable and glanceable access to information and quick actions on the watch face. And Android has partnered with Samsung to make it easier to design watch faces as well. Watch Face Studio, created by Samsung, enables developers to create watch faces rapidly without any coding knowledge.

Image: Google

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