Google announced a lot of new changes to its Android operating system today. This announcement was made at Android Dev Summit. Google also revealed new tools and features that will help developers create better applications for Android.
The Developers Summit will take place from 7th to 8th November 2018 at MountainView California.
One of these tools is the launch of the In-app Updates API. The name might be quite boring, but the API has main functions. With this API, developers now get two new ways to push users to update their app.
If there is a major, system crashing bug, apps will be able to show messages across users’ screens. It will be a full-screen message that will be shown. Users will be shown the message when they first start the app again and while the update is applied.
This message will only be displayed when the bug is too fatal. This will ensure users don’t download the update immediately, as it might cause system crashes.
The second option will give users more flexibility. Users will be able to use the app, even when the app is being downloaded. Google will now give developers more control over how their apps get updated.
Google senior director for Android product management and developer relations Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson told TechCrunch, “This is something that developers have asked us for a long time is — say you own an app and you want to make sure the user is running the latest version .”
She further added, “This is something developers really fret.” This feature is still in the early stage. Google is working tirelessly to keep the API as updated as possible, but it will take some time. The delay will be resolved when more developers get to play with the API.
Cuthbertson remarked, the team’s focus in recent years has been on making developers’ lives easier by giving them what they want. The flexibility in that is provided by Kotlin. The programming language has seen steady growth over the years.
Kotlin isn’t a programming language developed by Google, yet somehow many Android developers still use it extensively.
More than 118,000 projects were developed in Android Studio using the Kotlin language in October. The actual number might be even higher, since not every developer reports back to Google. For those of you who don’t know Kotlin is a statically typed programming language that runs on the Java virtual machine.
It was created for writing build scripts.
Google is also looking into the problem of slow build times in Android Studio. After running several tests, the team found out that there is some disharmony within the platform. So Google will develop more of its plugins to accelerate performance, going forward into the future.
The search engine giant will also create several analysis tools for developers. App creators will be able to use these tools on their own to monitor their build times.
There’s another massive news for Android developers. They will get to create their apps within Chrome OS. The operating system will get official support for Android Studio from next year. It will be due to the new update that will allow Linux applications to run within Chrome OS.
Stay tuned for more updates!
Muhammad Abdullah
Hamza Tauqeer
