According to the survey, Clojure, TypeScript, Elixir and Julia took the next four spots, respectively, in the top five most loved programming languages amongst developers. Despite how popular Apple’s devices are, the company’s Swift programming languages was the eighth most popular language amongst developers.

Rust, though, is not only a favourite amongst developers. A July 2021 whitepaper from BlackBerry noted that cybercriminals and malware makers are also adopting the language to build trojans that can be used for infiltrating devices. “Malware authors are known for their ability to adapt and modify their skills and behaviors to take advantage of newer technologies,” said Eric Milam, vice president of Threat Research at BlackBerry. He added:

“This has multiple benefits from the development cycle and inherent lack of coverage from protective products. This paper looks into less prolific programming languages and their use in the malware space. It is critical that industry and customers understand and keep tabs on these trends, as they are only going to increase.”

Further, despite efforts by companies like Google and Apple to put an end to JavaScripts, the language remains the most common amongst scripting languages. These are often used to track users’ activity online and to make web pages interactive. HTML/CSS and Python were also preferred by developers.

Amongst frameworks and libraries – code written by others that can be used to solve common problems – Google’s TensorFlow was amongst the top five while Microsoft’s .NET was the most loved framework. The company’s Windows was also a favourite operating system amongst developers, while Linux-based operating systems came in second. Apple’s MacOS was the third most preferred operating system for developers.

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.