Since its introduction during I/O 2019, Jetpack Compose was obviously destined to become the prescribed method of Android UI development. After more than two years in public development, it has hit the milestone many developers have been waiting for: an official 1.0 release. Alongside a stable release of Android Studio Arctic Fox, Jetpack Compose is ready for use in production code.
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The first Android 12 beta just launched yesterday, and it brought a whole slew of design and animation changes with it. But Google is also working on reducing CPU and GPU usage and cleaning up transitions between apps and notifications. As part of that effort, the company is making audio transitions less jarring when you switch from app to app.
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Google is moving to unify app development for Android Auto and Android Automotive. It feels long overdue, as there's no good reason to have two different routes for creating apps for what is essentially the same form factor.
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Android development may have started as a grab bag of poorly integrated libraries with no documentation and running it all in a bad IDE, but things have really turned around over the years. Android Studio makes it easier to build working apps with fewer mistakes; Kotlin makes for more readable straightforward code; and the combination of Jetpack and Jetpack Compose provides a clear direction for faster development. Today's announcement really focuses on Jetpack Compose, but as you would expect from each Google I/O, new versions of each are coming out and they've got something new for everybody.
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Google can already consider ARCore a success, with the app hitting one billion installs on the Play Store in December 2020. The company has also shared that about 850 million devices with an ARCore certification are currently active, so it's no wonder Google is invested in improving the experience that gives us AR animals as well as TikTok and Duo filters. Following the I/O keynote, the company is launching ARCore 1.24, which introduces a so-called Raw Depth API and the Recording and Playback API.
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Flutter's popularity has been exploding recently, and it's not hard to see why. The cross-platform framework made huge strides with the release of v2.0 a couple months ago when it gained official support for every major OS available, received substantial tooling enhancements, and made inroads toward protecting against instability with the addition of sound null safety. Now Google is taking an opportunity at I/O 2021 to announce Flutter 2.2.
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We exclusively reported that Google is working on bringing official Steam support to Chromebooks back in 2020. Parallel to developing a new Linux container better suited for games, the company is now additionally experimenting with a new "Game Mode" that could bring some further performance to the upcoming Linux container.
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On Chrome OS, the browser and the operating system are deeply intertwined. Google can't update one component without the other, making development a hassle. The company is looking to change that by introducing a decoupled version of Chrome (dubbed "Lacros"), which could simplify processes for developers and might even extend Chromebooks' lives. New evidence suggests that Google is inching closer to publicly testing Lacros.
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The great unicorn of software development is to have one language and framework that enables devs to code an app once and run it on any operating system and any type of device. Flutter has been aiming to do this since its inception, and today it gets quite a bit closer to that goal with the announcement of Flutter 2. The latest major update brings major enhancements for mobile platforms, adds support to desktop, and massively extends its capabilities on the web — among other things.
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Google released the first developer preview of Android 12 yesterday, but the virtual Android environment on Chrome OS is still stuck on Android 9. Google has long been working on updating it to Android 11, though it looks like it's in the process of abandoning this endeavor. Instead, we found evidence that Google might be skipping ahead to version 12 right away.
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