Episode 154: It's a Wrap!

This episode is dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and colleague, Carl Quinn.

Our last episode of the year arrives just in time for the holiday season. In this episode, Tor, Chet, and Romain go over everything that happened in 2020, both good and bad. We look back at how conferences have been impacted by the pandemic, why Android Studio changed its versioning scheme, the new tools and libraries that were released, etc.

We would like to thank all of our listeners for their continued support. We'll be back in early 2021 with more episodes and new guests!

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio
file directly.

Chet: @chethaase

Romain: @romainguy
Tor: @tornorbye

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 153: Ok, Ok, Ok

Romain, Tor, and Chet talked with Jesse Wilson from Square. Jesse has worked on several popular open-source libraries, including OkHttp, Okio, and [Ok]Moshi. We talk about those libraries, and others, and about Android, library, framework and Kotlin development. And about that nasty habit some engineers have of turning a feature request or minor annoyance into a project of creating a new open-source library instead.

Favorite quote, from Jesse:

"I started with 2k. Someone told me 8k was faster."

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.


Links:

OkHttp

OkHttp Kotlin Release

Okio

Okio Buffer.kt internals

GraalVM

Jesse: @jessewilson

Chet: @chethaase
Romain: @romainguy
Tor: @tornorbye

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 152: Image Loading with Coil

Chet, Colin, Romain, and Tor

This week, Tor, Romain and Chet are joined by a special guest: Colin White from Instacart.

Colin is the author of Coil, a popular image loading library backed by Kotlin and Kotlin Coroutines. In this episode, Colin explains what Coil is, how and why it was created, etc.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.


Links:

Coil

Coil on GitHub

The feature request Romain filed

And the PR to implement that feature request

Colin: @colinwhi

Chet: @chethaase
Romain: @romainguy
Tor: @tornorbye

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 151: Paging3

Chet, Dustin, Chris, and Romain.
(Tor not pictured. Because he wasn't there)

Romain and Chet talked with Dustin Lam and Chris Craik from the Toolkit team about Paging3.

Paging3 (currently in alpha) is a complete rewrite of (wait for it...) Paging2, using Kotlin, coroutines, and Flow for optimal implementation and APIs. (But note that there are also APIs for developers using the Java programming language and/or RxJava, so take your pick). We talk about Paging, the asynchronous work that made coroutines an obvious choice for the implementation, recent and future features, and API design in general.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.


Links:

AndroidX Paging library

Bug bounty hotlist!

Dustin: @itsdustinlam

Chris: @chris_craik
Chet: @chethaase
Romain: @romainguy
Tor: @tornorbye

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 150: Aaptly Named

Top row: Tor and Romain
Bottom row: Ryan and Chet

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor talk with Ryan Mitchell from the Android Framework Team.

We cover the Android resources in general and the aapt2 tool in particular.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Chet: @chethaase
Romain: @romainguy
Tor: @tornorbye

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 149: ADB over WiFi on ADB

Top row: Chet, Joshua and Romain.
Bottom row: Renaud and Tor

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor talk with Renaud Paquay and Joshua Duong from the Android Studio and Android Emulator teams.

We cover the new ADB over WiFi feature in Android 11, and the Android Studio support for pairing and connecting.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

• https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/adb#connect-to-a-device-over-wi-fi-android-11+

Renaud: /u/adt_renaud
Joshua: /u/joshuaduong
Chet: @chethaase
Romain: @romainguy
Tor: @tornorbye

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

ADB 148: [Constraint|Motion][Layout|Editor]

Sean McQuillan and I talked with Nicolas Roard and John Hoford about MotionEditor, which went stable recently in Android Studio 4.0. But as long as we were talking about that tool, we also talked extensively about MotionLayout in general as well as ConstraintLayout, new features like Flow, the difficulties of animating text properties, and  more.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

MotionTags screencast series

MotionEditor guide

MotionEditor release article

ConstraintLayout guide

ConstraintLayout 2.0 article

John: @johnhoford

Nicolas: @camaelon
Chet: @chethaase

Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 147: Jetpack Compose Alpha

The real star of the show: Jetpack Compose

This week, after a long series of developer previews, we are celebrating the release of Jetpack Compose alpha. In this episode, Clara Bayarri, Matvei Malkov, and Anna-Chiara Bellini are joining Chet and Romain to talk about this milestone. You will learn more about what does the alpha mean to the team, where did Compose come from, how the team approaches API design, some of the challenges behind building a new UI toolkit, and much more.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Jetpack Compose
Tutorials and codelabs

Android Studio Setup
Samples on GitHub
Thinking in Compose (video)

Chet: @chethaase

Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 146: The Game Changer

Dan (played by an icon), Greg, and
a tiny Romain in the upper right

This time, Romain was hosting all on his own for this conversation about game technology with Greg Hartrell, product manager for games on Play/Android, and Dan Galpin, developer advocate for games on Android. They talked about recent developments and offerings for game developers, including the Android development plugin for Visual Studio, other specialized tools for game developers, and new offerings from the team like Android Asset Delivery and Android App Bundle for distribution.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Build Games for Android

Android Game Dev Show

Greg: @ghartrell

Dan: @dagalpin
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 145: Grab that Dagger by the Hilt

Eric, Dany, and Romain. Chet not represented to hide the
confused look he had on his face during the entire recording.

We're injecting dependencies! In this episode, Chet and Romain are joined by Daniel Santiago from Jetpack, and Eric Chang from Dagger to talk about Hilt. Hilt builds on Dagger for form Android's new recommended way to perform dependency injection. And it's also a great opportunity for Chet and Romain to display their lack of knowledge in that space.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Dagger.dev
Hilt on dagger.dev
Introduction to Hilt by Dany
Dependency injection on Android

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 144: Compilers

Mads, Chet and Tor

In this episode, Chet and Tor talk with Mads Ager from the Android Studio compilers team. We cover a number of subjects, from r8 and d8 optimizations and resource shrinking to work on the Kotlin compiler front- and back-end, as well as the new Kotlin symbol processor.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

• R8/D8: https://r8.googlesource.com/r8
• KSP: https://github.com/android/kotlin/tree/ksp/libraries/tools/kotlin-symbol-processing-api
• Kotlin: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/

Mads: @madsager
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 143: Shhhh! Private!

Tor, Romain, Sara, Philip, and a little tiny Chet top-right

In this episode, Tor, Chet, and Romain talk with Sara N-Marandi and Philip Moltmann from the Android framework team about some of the new permissions changes in Android 11. We talk about why these changes were made, how to use them correctly in your code, and how things actually work on the inside.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

• Developer Guide: Request App Permissions
• Video: Developing with the latest privacy changes in Android 11
• Video: All things privacy in Android 11

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 142: Machine Learning Learning

Hoi and Matej in the top row, Chet and Tor below

In this episode, Chet and Tor talk with Hoi Lam and Matej Pfajfar about machine learning on Android. Tune in to learn about ML Kit, TensorFlow Lite, transfer learning, federated learning, ML model binding, the Android Neural Networks API, and more!

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

• ML Kit: g.co/mlkit 
• TensorFlow Lite Model Maker: https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/tutorials/model_maker_image_classification
• Android Studio 4.1 with ML Binding - https://developer.android.com/studio/preview/features#tensor-flow-lite-models 
• People + AI Guidebook, suitable for SWE, Designers and PMs https://pair.withgoogle.com/guidebook/ 
• Material Design Showcase Sample https://github.com/googlesamples/mlkit/tree/master/android/material-showcase 

Hoi: @hoitab
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 141: Discussing Conversations

Romain, Tor's large head and bad framing, Chet's
little tiny picture top-right, Julia, and Stefan

It's all about people! In this episode, Tor, Chet and Romain are joined by Julia  Reynolds and Stefan Franks from the System UI team to have a discussion about conversations. We also converse about things unrelated to conversations.

Starting with Android 11, conversation notifications now appear in a dedicated space at the top of the notifications shade. These notifications come with specific actions like opening a bubble or setting a reminder. Tune in to learn more about this new people-forward design.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Android 11 Beta
Notifications

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 140: Bubbles!

Artur, Chet, Mady, Romain and Tor

In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor talked with Mady Melor  and Artur Tsurkan from the System UI team about... Bubbles!

Bubbles let users easily multi-task from anywhere on their device, and facilitates real-time communication using a chat application.

Tune in to learn more about this new API in Android 11!


Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/bubbles

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 139: AndroidX. Jetpack. AndroidX. Jetpack. Whatever.

Romain, Chet, Alan, Nick, and a little tiny Tor
in the upper-right corner

In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor talked with Nick Anthony and Alan Viverette from the AndroidX team about... AndroidX. And Jetpack. And androidx. (Spoiler alert: androidx is the set of libraries. Jetpack is that... plus opinionated guidance. AndroidX is the name of the team that ships this stuff).

We also talked about the release cadence (currently every two weeks, up from every-several-months a couple of years ago), the standards for release naming/versioning, API standards, and everything else in the world of AndroidX infrastructure and release.



Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

AndroidX releases

Alan: /u/alanviverette
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 138: Animated IME — Oh, my!

Chet, Romain, Jorim, Adrian and Taran. Oh and Tor hiding the upper  right.

In this episode, Tor, Chet and Romain are joined by Jorim, Adrian and Taran from the Window Manager team. We discussed newly announced capabilities of the IME (Input Method Editor) in Android  11. These new APIs allow applications to react in real-time to IME animations and thus provide a more polished and seamless user experience. It also happens to be the answer to one of your most requested features: knowing when the on-screen keyboard is showing.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 137: Accessibility

Chet, Qasid, Romain, Sally, Tor, and a very mysterious
guest in a very dark room in the lower-right.

In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor talked (remotely!) with Sally Yuen and Qasid Sadiq from the Accessibility team. We discussed the kinds of tools and facilities that their team provides, and how developers can (and should!) make their applications more accessible. We talked about Accessibility Services, Talkback, Accessibility Scanner, organizational complexities of accessibility efforts, and more.

Pro tip: Avoid creating custom widgets by using the built-in widgets in the platform to inherit accessibility functionality for free.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links

Build more accessible apps: Guide with videos and links to more resources.

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 136: Remoting

Tor, Chet, and Romain, remembering the way things used
to be, back when there was a recording studio instead of
closets at home.

In this episode, Romain, Chet and Tor chat with zero guests about the current work-from-home reality, and about adjustments we've all made as we change the way we work.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 135: Audio Podcast

Tor, Don, Chet, and Phil, on a video conference on Tor's
machine. VCs are critical to mitigating (but not actually
solving) latency issues with remote podcasts.

In this first ever full-remote episode, Tor and Chet discuss audio programming with Don Turner from the Android DevRel team, and Phil Burk from the Android Audio Framework team. They chat about Oboe, low-latency audio, audio performance in general, etc. And because Don and Phil know everything about audio, more time was spent before the recording discussing how to properly record the episode than was spent actually recording the episode.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

If you enjoyed this episode you might also be interested in episode 39, about MIDI audio with Phil Burk.

Phil: @philburk
Don: @donturner
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Dustin Elm.

Episode 134: All Work No Play

Rahul (Work), Sumir (Manager), and Chet

In this episode, Chet talks with Sumir Kataria and Rahul Ravikumar from the Android Toolkit team about Work Manager! Tune in to learn about work manager, an AndroidX library for deferrable background work, and recent changes such as on demand initialization, new lint checks, and more!

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Relevant Talks:

• Working with WorkManager, from the 2018 Android Dev Summit
• WorkManager: Beyond the basics, from the 2019 Android Dev Summit

Releases & Bugs:

• Recent releases
• Link for filing issues: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/new?component=409906&template=1094197

Sumir: @SumirKodes
Rahul: @tikurahul
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Episode 133: Power Play

Kweku, Makoto, Amith, Chet, Romain, and Tor

In this episode, Chet talked with Amith Yamasani, Makoto Onuki, and Kweku Adams from the framework team about power management. We waxed poetic about the heuristics the system uses to kill tasks, doze mode and how the system tries to save battery, TrimMemory requests, JobScheduler (the underlying platform facility used by WorkManager), AppStandby buckets, and more.

Favorite word: OOMAdjust (Out of Memory Adjustment, but I far prefer the abbreviation)

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:

• App Standby Buckets
• Optimizing for Battery Life
• Improve Battery Life with Restrictions (presentation at ADS 2018)

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Episode 132: Storing data with Store

Mike, Romain, Yigit, and Chet

In this episode, Chet and Romain talk with Yigit Boyar, from the Jetpack team, and Mike Nakhimovich from Dropbox. Mike and Yigit have been working on an Open Source library called Store. Store helps with the fetching, caching, storing and sharing of data in your application. Both Yigit and Mike used this opportunity to teach Chet and Romain about the repository pattern, how Store works, what makes building a library like Store challenging and much more.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:

• Store on Github
• Room

Mike: @friendlymikhail
Yigit: @ yigitboyar
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Episode 131: Jetpack Compose and Declarative UIs

Adam, Romain, Tor, and Chet, on location
in the fancy and totally upscale ADB recording studio

In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk with Adam Powell from the UI Toolkit team about Jetpack Compose. The conversation meandered into declarative programming, reacting to state changes, data flowing through an application, and Kotlin domain-specific languages.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:

• Jetpack Compose overview
• Jetpack Compose tutorial

Adam: @adampwp
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Episode 130: First Law of Motion...Layout

Tor, Nicolas, John, Romain and Chet in the Android Studio

In this episode, Tor, Romain and Chet chit chat with Nicolas Roard and John Hoford from the Android Studio team about Motion Layout -- and ConstraintLayout and visual editing in the IDE.

In the recording session they also promised to release ConstraintLayout 2.0 beta 4 before the podcast was released. And they achieved that: https://androidstudio.googleblog.com/2019/12/constraintlayout-200-beta-4.html.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Links:

• Constraintlayout codelab: https://developer.android.com/training/constraint-layout
• MotionLayout codelab: https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/motion-layout
• MotionLayout workshop with John and Nicolas from DroidconSF: https://camaelon.github.io/
• ConstraintLayout reference page: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/constraintlayout/widget/ConstraintLayout
• MotionLayout reference page: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/constraintlayout/motion/widget/MotionLayout
• MotionLayout page: https://developer.android.com/training/constraint-layout/motionlayout
• MotionLayout examples: https://developer.android.com/training/constraint-layout/motionlayout/examples
• ConstraintLayout and MotionLayout github samples: https://github.com/android/views-widgets-samples/tree/master/ConstraintLayoutExamples
• Medium article on MotionLayout: https://medium.com/google-developers/introduction-to-motionlayout-part-i-29208674b10d

Nicolas: @camaelon
John: @johnhoford
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.