NiA42 in Video and Podcast Form

This Now in Android is also offered in video and podcast form. It’s the same content, but with less reading required.

App Bundles

Google Play will start requiring new apps to be published with the Android App Bundle starting August 2021. This will replace the APK as the standard publishing format.

If you haven’t made the switch to app bundles yet, read the blog post to know the benefits of app bundles and how they help both developers and users.

MAD Skills: More Navigation wrap-up

The series on More Navigation finished since the previous Now in Android, ending with a livestream Q&A. Thanks for all the questions, and navigate over to the recording to see what happened.

AndroidX Releases

A new library in alpha is core-splashscreen that provides backwards compatibility for the Splash Screen APIs in Android 12. The APIs are backported down to API 23!

Jetpack Compose and DataStore have now reached release candidate status meaning the 1.0 stable releases are right around the corner!

Now that Jetpack Compose is going stable soon, more and more technologies will start adopting it. And that’s already the case of WearOS. Wear Compose is a new library to write apps for Wearable devices using Jetpack Compose. It supports Wear Material Design and the first alpha version of the library just landed.

Better physical stories with Google’s Nearby APIs

In the Nearby APIs series, there are different journeys available that require physical proximity: One-way message detection, two-way communications, and device-pairing with Fast Pair.

The first part of the series is about the first use case, the Nearby Messages API that allows you to send small binary payloads between internet-connected Android and iOS devices.

Two-way communication without internet: Nearby Connections

Two-way communication allows users to connect with each other even when no Internet is available. But this also allows unlimited amounts of data to be transferred using the Nearby Connections API.