Android developer information for July 2021

Android 12 Beta 3 and remaining APIs — This new model brings a bunch of helpful new options, together with an enhanced auto-rotate, scrolling screenshots, and privateness indicator APIs. Furthermore, it additionally brings the finalized Android 12 APIs and the official SDK. This implies it’s go-time for builders that need to begin testing and updating their apps in anticipation of Platform Stability, coming with the subsequent Beta.

12 Beta 3 additionally lets us mess around with Sport Mode APIs, which is able to enable devs to configure their creations primarily based on consumer preferences (akin to efficiency vs battery life). This will probably be tied to the upcoming “recreation dashboard” that can supply an in-game overlay and entry to utilities throughout gameplay.

Introducing the Android Sport Improvement Package — The Android Sport Improvement Package will present Android improvement with highly effective libraries written with C and C++. This can scale back reliance on the Java Native Interface (JNI) and will lead to sooner efficiency.

Proper now, the libraries concentrate on “exercise and enter.” Sport Exercise gives a basis for Android improvement, dealing with issues like display rotation and app lifecycle. Sport Textual content Enter and Sport Controller each do precisely what you’d count on.

Google says it’s responding to the “prime frustrations.” Nevertheless, it seems extra like it’s lastly offering the naked minimal for recreation improvement dealt with in Android Studio. And the result’s wanting like but one other subsection of Android improvement for builders to attempt to familiarize themselves with.

With that mentioned, it plans so as to add extra over time, and also will be working with Unity and different recreation engines for better synergy and stability throughout the spectrum. Let’s hope the help comes thick and quick.

Nonetheless, this is excellent information for people who take pleasure in cross-platform improvement by Xamarin. This could guarantee libraries and help stay steady and up-to-date when utilizing Visible Studio. The outcome will hopefully be much less switching between IDEs and simpler multi-platform worfklows.

Saying Android’s updateable, absolutely built-in ML inference stack — It’s not simply recreation builders that bought some love this month. On-Machine Machine Studying has additionally been given a lift, because of the Android ML Platform. This can be a fully-integrated ML inference stack that can present builders with built-in on-device inference necessities, a constant API throughout all Android variations, and TensorFlow Lite accessible on all units with Google Play Providers. This could tackle some key ache factors for builders that depend on ML for his or her purposes.

Updates from the Google for Video games Developer Summit — All of the bulletins from the occasion, together with the AGDK and AGDE. Different highlights embody “Play as you obtain,” which is able to enable customers to start out taking part in their video games immediately whereas property are downloaded within the background, and the Play Integrity API, designed to assist builders fight abuse. There’s additionally that exciting-sounding in-game overlay coming.