Android Q scores a system-wide ‘Dark Theme’

Google is bringing a system-wide dark mode to Android Q. It’s called Dark Theme and it’s exactly what you would expect, changing white page elements to solid black across the OS for friendlier night-time viewing.

You’ll be able to activate dark mode by tapping a dedicates tile in Quick Settings, or it can be auto-triggered when you turn on battery-saver mode. The company says the mode “will help you save battery,” highlighting how “Dark Theme” will fire up fewer pixels on your OLED device.

It looks like the theme will be coming to all of the first-party Android apps. Developers should be able to bring the functionality to their apps to easily trigger dark modes when Dark Theme is enabled.

Google acknowledged it was a small update, but that didn’t stop the crowd from whooping it up.

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Google launches new Assistant developer tools

At its I/O conference, Google today announced a slew of new tools for developers who want to build experiences for the company’s Assistant platform. These range from the ability to build games for smart displays like the Google Home Hub and the launch of App Actions for taking users from an Assistant answer to their native apps, to a new Local Home SDK that allows developers to run their smart home code locally on Google Home Speakers and Nest Displays.

This Local Home SDK, may actually be the most important announcement in this list, given that it turns these devices into a real hardware hub for these smart home devices and provides local compute capacity without the round-trip to the cloud. The first set of partners include Philips, Wemo, TP-Link and LIFX, but the SDK will become available to all developers next month.

In addition, this SDK will make it easier for new users to set up their smart devices in the Google Home app. Google tested this feature with GE last October and is now ready to roll it out to additional partners.

Developers who want to take people from the Assistant to the right spot inside of their native apps, Google announced a preview of App Actions last year. Health and fitness, finance, banking, ridesharing and food ordering apps can now make use of these built-in intents. “If I wanted to track my run with Nike Run Club, I could just say ‘Hey Google, start my run in Nike Run Club’ and the app will automatically start tracking my run,” Google explains in today’s announcement.

For how-to sites, Google also announced extended markup support that allows them to prepare their content for inclusion in Google Assistant answers on smart displays and in Google Search using standard schema.org markup.

You can read more about the new ability to write games for smart displays here, but this is clearly just a first step and Google plans to open up the platform to more third-party experiences over time.

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Google launches Jetpack Compose, an open-source, Kotlin-based UI development toolkit

Google today announced the first preview of Jetpack Compose, a new open-source UI toolkit for Kotlin developers who want to use a reactive programming model similar to what React Native and Vue.js.

Jetpack Compose is an unbundled toolkit that is part of Google’s overall Android Jetpack set of software components for Android developers, but there is no requirement to use any other Jetpack components. With Jetpack Compose, Google is essentially bringing the UI-as-code philosophy to Android development. Compose’s UI components are fully declarative and allow developers to create layouts by simply describing what the UI should look like in their code. The Compose framework will handle all the gory details of UI optimization for the developer.

Developers can mix and match the Jetpack Compose APIs and view with those based on Android’s native APIs. Out of the box, Jetpack Compose also natively supports Google’s Material Design.

As part of today’s overall Jetpack update, Google is also launching a number of new Jetpack components and features. These range from support for building apps for Android for Cars and Android Auto to an Enterprise library for making it easier to integrate apps with Enterprise Mobility Management solutions and built-in benchmarking tools

The standout feature, though, is probably CameraX, a new library that allows developers to build camera-centric features and applications that gives developers access to essentially the same features as the native Android camera app.

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Android developers can now force app updates

Half a year ago, at the Android Dev Summit, Google announced a new way for developers to force their users to update their apps when they launch new features or important bug fixes. It’s only now, at Google I/O, though, that the company is actually making this feature available to developers. Previously, it was only available to a few select Google partners.

In addition, Google is also launching its dynamics updates feature out of beta. This allows developers to deliver some of their apps’ modules on demand, reducing the file size for the initial install.

“Right now, if you have an update, either you have auto-update or you need to go to the Play Store to even know that there is an update, or maybe the Play Store will give you a notification,” Chet Haase, Chief Advocate for Android, said. “But what if you have a really critical feature that you want people to get or, let’s say, a security issue you want to address, or a payment issue and you really want all of your users to get that as quickly as they can.”

This new feature, called Inline Updates, gives developers access to a new API that they can then use to force users to update. Developers can force users to update, say with a full-screen blocking message, force-install the update in the background and restart the app when the download has completed, or create their own custom update flows.

Android developers can now force users to update their apps

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Google latest Android Studio release focuses on speed and stability

At last year’s I/O developer conference, Google announced Project Marble, an effort to bring more speed and stability to the company’s Android Studio IDE. That was in marked contrast to previous updates, where the focus was very much on adding new features. Over time, though, as Google extended Android Studio, it started to slow down. Android Studio 3.5, which the company is launching today, is the result of these efforts.

“We are certainly not done improving quality with Android Studio, but with the work and new infrastructure put into Project Marble we hope that you are even more productive in developing Android apps,” the company notes in today’s announcement.

The most important updates probably focus on speed. One of the things that slowed Android Studio down were memory leaks, for example. Over the last year, the team fixed 33 major memory leaks and a new feature allows the IDE to collect more information about how it uses memory and suggest memory settings for you. It’s now also easier for developers to share their memory problems with Google.

The team also addressed user interface freezes and improved both build and overall IDE speed. The Android Emulator now also uses fewer CPU resources, often by up to 3x.

One interesting update will bring a welcome change to Android Studio users on Windows. Developers on Microsoft’s platform often complained about how their build times were getting slower. The reason for this, it turned out, was that many anti-virus programs would scan Android Studio’s build targets — and these have a lot of small files. Scanning those takes up a lot of I/O and CPU bandwidth. With this update, the IDE now check the directories that could be impacted by this and recommends how to fix this issue.

In addition to these updates that focus on speed and stability, the team also polished numerous existing features, ranging from improved Intellij support to Layout Editor improvement. Android Studio 3.5 is now also officially supported on Chrome OS 72 and high-end x86-based Chromebooks.

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Android Q devices will get over-the-air security updates — but there’s a catch

Devices shipping with Android Q will receive over-the-air security patches without having to go through device manufacturers.

A lack of steady security updates has been a major pain point for Android users over the years. Google finally has a fix for the problem. At its annual developer conference Tuesday, the tech giant said it’ll bypass mobile makers and push security updates directly to devices.

The benefit is that users won’t have to wait lengthy periods for device manufacturers to test and quality assure the patches for their devices for fixes to critical security vulnerabilities that put users at risk.

Security updates for Android Q will be focused on 14 modules crucial to the operating system’s functioning — including media codecs, which have long plagued the Android software with a steady stream of security flaws.

There’s a catch — two, in fact.

Devices updating to Android Q will not work with over-the-air security updates and some manufacturers can opt-out altogether, according to The Verge which first reported the news, rendering the feature effectively useless. The new feature will also not be backported to earlier versions of Android. Google hasn’t updated its Android software version distribution pages for some months. Given that based on the figures available, more than half of all Android users are still on Android 5.0 Lollipop and earlier, it could take years for Android Q to match the same usage share.

Still, Google has to start somewhere. Android Q is expected out later this year.

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Android now has 2.5B users

At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced that Android now has over 2.5 billion users. That’s up from 2 billion the company announced two years ago.

This means overall Android growth remains on pace, though it’s not exactly accelerating. From September 2015 to May 2017, the company added about 400 million new users. It took another two years to add 500 million additional users.

Android remains the most popular mobile operating system, though over the course of the last few years, Google also invested in KaiOS, the outgrowth of Mozilla’s failed Firefox OS. We didn’t hear much about KaiOS at I/O so far, but there is a good chance that this platform will become more important over time as more users come online in developing countries, something Google is quite aware of.

Google has 2 billion users on Android, 500M on Google Photos

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