InfoQ Homepage Android Content on InfoQ
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Wear OS Gets New, More Efficient Text-to-Speech Engine
Google has announced a new text-to-speech engine for Wear OS, its Android variant aimed at smartwatches and other wearables, supporting over 50 languages and faster than its predecessor thanks to using smaller ML models.
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Android Fused Orientation Provider Aims to Improve Device Orientation Management
The Fused Orientation Provider (FOP) is a new Android API that uses signals from motion sensors embedded in a smartphone to provide consistent and reliable device orientation. FOP is distributed through Google Play Services and is available on all devices running Android 5, independently from their manufacturers.
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Android Studio Iguana Brings Crashlytics Integration, Compose UI Check, Baseline Profiles Wizard
The latest version of Android Studio, dubbed Iguana, brings several new features, including better integration with Crashlytics; Compose UI Check, a new tool to verify Compose UI design and behavior; improved rendering for Compose views; a wizard to create baseline profiles, and more.
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Google Project IDX Integrates iOS and Android Emulator, Extends Templates Library, and More
Six months after its launch, Google has extended its experimental AI-powered, Cloud-based, shared workspace Project IDX with the introduction of integrated iOS simulator and Android emulator, new project templates, better integration with the Nix package manager, and more.
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How Continuous Mobile Development Can Benefit from Test Automation
Test automation can support continuous mobile software development by reducing manual testing efforts, minimizing human errors, and accelerating the release cycle. Burak Ergören shared his experiences from automating their mobile testing at QA Challenge Accepted 2023.
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Jetpack Compose 1.6 Brings Improved Performance and Extends Supported APIs
The latest release of Android UI toolkit Jetpack Compose aims to improve overall performance and extends supported APIs, including drag and drop, selection by mouse, spline-based keyframe animations, and more.
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KSP2 Aims to Improve Kotlin Meta-Programming, Adds Support for the K2 Kotlin Compiler
Currently available in preview, KSP 2.0, the evolution of Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP), introduces a new architecture aimed at resolving some limitations in KSP 1.0 and adds support for the new K2 Kotlin compiler, explain Google software engineers Ting-Yuan Huang and Jiaxiang Chen.
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Using Gemini AI in Android Apps with the New Google AI SDK
Google introduced its new Google AI SDK to simplify integrating Gemini Pro, its best-performing model to date, in Android apps. Using this SDK, developers need not build and manage their own backend infrastructure.
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Android Studio Hedgehog Upgrades to IntelliJ 2023.1, Improves Developer Experience, and More
The latest release of Android Studio, dubbed Hedgehog, is now stable. It includes IntelliJ 2023.1, new features for improving app performance, boosting developer productivity, and creating UI using Jetpack Compose.
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Key Lessons for Mobile Release Management from DoorDash
The release process for DoorDash mobile apps is based on clear-cut responsibilities shared across teams, effective communication, testing, and strict rules about handling regressions and hotfixes, explains DoorDash engineer Manolo Sañudo. While not all organizations work at DoorDash scale, many aspects of their approach can prove useful to smaller organizations, too.
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How Spotify Fights Global Warming by Taking Their Mobile App Size under Control
Adding new features has often a hidden impact on app size, with several undesired effects, including user disengagement and unnecessary carbon emissions. To keep app size under control, Spotify engineers established pre-PR and post-PR processes to help prevent an estimated 10MB app size growth over six months.
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Android Telecom Library Aims to Simplify the Creation of Voice and Video Apps
Available in Alpha, the new Telecom jetpack library simplifies the process of creating voice and/or video calling applications for Android developers by providing several APIs to support common functionality like answering/declining, audio routing, and so on.
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Kotlin Multiplatform Reaches Stability
Kotlin Multiplatform, a solution created by JetBrains to enable the use of Kotlin to share native code across different platforms, is now stable and ready for production use, says JetBrains engineer Ekaterina Petrova.
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MediaPipe Now Supports On-Device Text-to-Image Generation on Android
Announced a few months ago, MediaPipe diffusion plugin is now available as an experimental tool on Android devices. Named Image Generator, the plugin can generate images entirely on-device in approximately 15 seconds on high end devices, says Google.
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Reddit Adopts Server-Driven UI for Its New Feed Architecture across Mobile Apps
Reddit reworked its feeds functionality in the iOS mobile app and introduced it to the Android app. In both cases, they used the Server-Driven UI (SDUI) as their communication approach, which allows localized content layout changes without mobile app releases.