Google has made some major changes to the Android development ecosystem once again. These are major changes that will allow designers to develop far better apps at a much faster pace. Google has been actively listening to its developers and fixing issues like background processing, configuration change, and navigation.
This year’s announcements are equally as significant as last year’s. If we continue on this trend, all of the major components will be in place by IO19, and Android developers will have all of the tools they need to develop amazing apps for the next 10 years. ‘Android Jetpack’ is the name given to Google’s recommended tools, libraries, and components.
Here are some of the major announcements made at Google IO that will fundamentally change the way Android apps are developed.
1. Material Design Components
Material Design Components is a collection of components that make it simple for developers to extend Material Design. This includes iOS, Flutter, and the web, with Google developing a sketch plugin to assist companies to manage their branding across several platforms.
2. Navigation
The number of entry points inside your app expands with Deeplinks, Shortcuts, and Push Notifications, making navigation more difficult. The navigation component promises to address these issues, allowing developers to simply build navigation in Android Studio using a visual editor. Developers will never have to deal with another fragment transaction or the backstack as a result of this.
3. WorkManager
There have been many different and complicated methods to attempt to do tasks in the background in the past. The WorkManager API is a clean API that is backwards compatible with API 14 and can even support multiple requests, allowing developers to quickly scheduled background work.
4. Dynamic Download
Because apps are becoming bigger and users are avoiding large apps like the plague, the dynamic download will allow users to download elements of the app that are utilised less frequently in a just-in-time way. This means that when you submit your app to the Playstore, you don’t have to include all of your code.
5. Paging
Paging can be challenging, but when you have a large dataset that you don’t want to load into memory, you’ll need to use this method. Because Android was created to work on a wide range of devices, from high-end to low-end, you must ensure that your app runs properly on all of them.
6. Kotlin
Even though Google first announced Kotlin last year, they are now advising developers to quit Java in favour of Kotlin. Many people believe that the Oracle lawsuit is the key reason.
Feel free to contact us if you are interested in these Android developments.
