Now in Android #28
By: Chet Haase
Tags: articles on Medium, Android, Android App Development, Now In Android

AndroidX

AndroidX libraries on GitHub

First of all, AndroidX has made more libraries available for contributions through GitHub.

We know that many developers prefer the familiar GitHub contribution flow to the AOSP+Gerrit system Android traditionally uses, and would be happy to see us use GitHub more.

Which is a great idea! But… difficult to do (given the infrastructure that we rely on). But we heard you and have started exploring this, making a small handful of libraries in active development available on GitHub, starting a few months back with Paging, Room, and WorkManager. Recently, we’ve also added the Activity, Fragment, and Navigation libraries. So check them out, and if you feel like contributing, see the details in the CONTRIBUTING doc for more information.

Stable releases

There were the usual plethora of alpha, beta, RC and minor stable releases, including this notable stable release:

MediaRouter 1.2.0: This version is interesting because it adds functionality that syncs with some of the new media functionality in Android 11.

Android 11 added a bunch of UI niceties for media players, sending the media controls into a new, dedicated space in the notification panel, to make it easier to control your media from one place instead of being interleaved with the rest of the notifications. This isn’t about new developer functionality, but rather a different presentation for notifications you are probably already creating; you can continue to use the MediaSession and MediaStyle APIs that have been available since the Lollipop release.

But there was some new functionality added in Android 11 for “seamless media transfer”, which allows users to change the playback device through the output switcher (shown below). This new release of MediaRouter allows you to interact with this new platform capability.

This new release of MediaRouter allows you to control which playback devices show up in the output switcher so your users can seamlessly move their audio around.

If you want to see the media changes in Android 11, check out Don Turner’s What’s New in media video.

Now in Alpha

I also wanted to call out a couple of interesting alpha releases. I don’t usually dwell on alphas because, well, they are alpha, and are therefore subject to change and iteration as the team continues to pound on them. But there were new releases for Paging and Navigation (just today!) that are interesting in terms of what they say about future development.

One of the questions we’ve been getting recently, as Jetpack Compose has been working through its alpha journey, is “What’s the future of [insert favorite Jetpack library here] in a Jetpack Compose world?”

Which is an… excellent question! The answer is that many of the architecture components aren’t specifically about Views or the existing UI Toolkit, so they will be equally necessary and helpful in the new world of Jetpack Compose. More than that, we’re building integrations to make it easy for different components to work together. Compose already offers integrations with ViewModels and LiveData and today marks the first release of both Paging and Navigation support for Jetpack Compose.