Episodes
In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk with Aurash Mahbod from the Play Games team at Google -- covering trends in mobile games, challenges for Android games developers, console games, and more!   Chapters: Intro (00:00) What’s Aurash working on currently? (02:40) How much is Play store providing users with content based on previous interests? (05:29) Longstanding games vs new games (08:34) Mobile gaming vs console (10:07) Are there stats on what type of games people are playing?...
Published 03/26/24
Published 03/26/24
In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk about one of Tor’s favorite topics: Lint! Specifically, we talk about Lint checks and the annotations that use them to enable better, more robust, and more self-documenting APIs. Lint: It’s not just for pockets anymore. Chapters: Intro (00:00) Lint checks for annotations (01:50) Lint checks in Android (05:38) Logic checks (07:34) Color representations (10:01) How does lint know the type of integer? (14:40) Kotlin annotations (17:19) ...
Published 02/21/24
In this episode, Tor, Romain, and Chet talk about some of the many things that happened this year in the world of Android development, including new devices and form factors, tool improvements, AndroidX features and libraries, and Jetpack Compose releases. And any tech podcast would be remiss without mentioning AI/ML, so we talk about that too. Tor, Romain and Chet Chapters: Intro (00:00) Google engineers vs Android (00:57) Big changes of 2023 intro (3:03) AI (3:38) Programming with...
Published 12/21/23
In this episode, Tor and Romain chat with Aurimas Liutikas from the AndroidX team. Topics include performance tuning the AndroidX Gradle builds using configuration caching, local caching and remote caching, as well as tracking API compatibility using the Metalava tool. Aurimas, Romain and Tor   Romain: @romainguy, threads.net/@romainguy, [email protected] Tor: threads.net/@tor.norbye and [email protected] Aurimas: androiddev.social/@Aurimas and...
Published 11/01/23
In this episode, Tor and Romain chat with Greg Baker and Joe Baker-Malone about exciting new Android Studio features made possible by Firebase integration. Physical device streaming allows you to connect remotely to physical devices hosted in Google’s secure data centers and use them for all your development needs. We also explore other time saving features like the ability to go from a crash report directly to the correct line of code, even across git branches.   Tor, Romain, Joe, Greg ...
Published 09/21/23
In this episode, Chet and Romain speak with Ken Russell and Corentin Wallez from the WebGPU team. WebGPU is a new API that brings modern GPU rendering and compute functionality to web and other platforms (including Android!). We talk about the genesis and capabilities of WebGPU, WGSL (WebGPU’s new shading language), the state of WebGL (the predecessor API for web GPU rendering), and lots of other fun related graphics topics. Ken, Romain, and Chet (not pictured: Corentin, who is on the...
Published 08/15/23
This time, Romain, Tor, and Chet talk with Leland Richardson, George Mount, and Chuck Jazdzewski from the Jetpack Compose team about performance. The team has been looking at performance issues recently and discusses what they’ve found, what gotchas lie in wait for library developers, what tools and compilers can magically handle for you... and what they can’t. Tune in to learn about why we worry about autoboxing (and why you probably shouldn’t). Foreground: Romain, Tor, George, and Chuck ...
Published 07/18/23
Since our original episode on location nearly nine years ago, a lot has happened in the location support for Android. In this episode, Wyatt Riley and Roy Want answer all of Tor's questions about how it works and cover recent developments like indoor location, elevation, and some tips for developers. Wyatt, Roy and Tor.   Links: Getting started guide Precise indoor location Wi-Fi Alliance(WFA) : Wi-Fi Location(TM) demonstrated at a recent WFA member event Android Developer...
Published 06/26/23
You saw it at Google I/O - now you can hear about it in the comfort of your own headphones! Tor, Romain, and Chet talk with Siva Velusamy and Sandhya Mohan from the Android Studio team about the just-launched Studio Bot. This new AI-powered assistant enables conversational queries in the IDE to help with coding, commenting, confusion, or if you just need a friend. Chet, Tor, Romain, Sandhy, and Siva in the Sunnyvale studio Studio Bot: https://goo.gle/3BBEKZI  Subscribe to Android...
Published 05/17/23
Raluca Sauciuc joins Tor and Romain to talk about what goes on behind the scenes in Android Studio. Raluca takes us through the tools and workflows used by the Android Studio team to improve performance and memory usage, and avoid future regressions. She also explains how the team adopts new versions of the IntelliJ IDE and platform, and how they can deal with massive code merges. Raluca, Romain, and Tor Romain: @romainguy and [email protected] Tor: @tornorbye and...
Published 03/22/23
Chet and Romain talk to Jeff Hamilton and Anton Hansson from the Mainline team about "modular system components", and the new SDK extension framework which lets developers access them.  Anton Hansson top right, and Jeff Hamilton bottom left, with Romain and Chet Blog post: https://goo.gle/3S1c3g4  AndroidX convenience constants, e.g. T_EXTENSION_INT: https://goo.gle/3lEJwRx  Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs
Published 02/15/23
This time, Tor, Romain, and Chet were joined by Siyamed Sinir and Sean McQuillan from the Android Text team to talk about, well, text. Which, it turns out, is a very deep, complicated, and constantly evolving technology. The conversation covered everything from the fundamentals of the text stack on Android to the capabilities and implementation of text in Jetpack Compose to internationalization to fonts to emojis to performance to.... you get the idea. There was a lot of stuff to talk about....
Published 01/17/23
In this episode, James Ward joins Chet, Tor, and Romain to talk about Kotlin. We talked about Kotlin Multiplatform (both KMP and KMM) and what’s coming for Kotlin in 2023, especially the new K2 frontend. James, Tor, Romain, and Chet. Links: Kotlin Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) Jetpack Multiplatform Libraries Compose Multiplatform by JetBrains   Romain: @romainguy and [email protected] Tor: @tornorbye and [email protected] Chet:...
Published 12/22/22
This time, Romain and Chet ditched Tor so that they could geek out about graphics, talking about paths, Bézier curves, morphing, and more. Romain and Chet alone in the recording Studio.   Links: V9: Vector 9-patches Pathway: Path data querying Android Path Shape Shifter Bézier Primer The Beauty of Bézier Curves Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy
Published 11/21/22
We recorded episode 191 from the studio in the London office, where Rebecca Franks from the developer relations team joined Chet as a guest host. We talked with Andrei Shikov, Matvei Malkov, and Andrey Kulikov from the Jetpack Compose engineering team about layouts, especially the lazy ones, which are the Compose equivalent of RecyclerView. Rebecca, Chet, Andrei, Andrey, and Matvei, in the London recording studio.   Links: Layouts in Compose Compose Custom layouts ADB 167: Jetpack...
Published 11/11/22
In this episode, Tor and Chet learn some more about performance from Carmen. Carmen works on the Android Platform Performance team and is an expert on everything related to performance. This is the perfect episode for you if you ever wanted to learn more about R8, perfetto, baseline profiles, custom performance tracing, power metrics, etc.  Tor, Carmen, and Chet   Links: Perfetto Android’s guide to app performance Baseline profiles Benchmarking with Microbenchmark and Macrobenchmark ...
Published 11/04/22
In this episode (the first in-studio-with-guests recording since early 2020!), Tor and Chet spoke with Marc Bächinger, Toni Heidenreich, and Andrew Lewis from the Android Media team, where they work on video technologies and APIs like ExoPlayer. We talked about the evolution of ExoPlayer and platform media capabilities as well as ongoing and near-future features. Back: Chet and Tor, Front: Mark, Toni, and Andrew   Links: Introduction to Media3 ExoPlayer on GitHub  Guide for migrating...
Published 09/22/22
It’s our first episode back in the studio, and in a new, shiny studio too! In this episode, we talk about some of our favorite new features and changes of the new version of Android, both for users and developers. More importantly, the audio quality of this episode is much better thanks to the amazing work from the media production teams at Google. Tor, Romain, and Chet happy to be back in a studio with proper audio equipment Links Android 13 for developers API diff Chet: @chethaase ...
Published 09/01/22
“Our job isn’t to remove complexity, but to manage it” - Glen Murphy (as remembered by Dan) In this episode, we talk with Dan Sandler and Adam Cohen from the SystemUI team. We dip into a bit of history, talking about where things were at when they joined the team (2009-10), and how things have developed in the many years since, including how these projects and teams scaled from a single person working on it part-time to now having much larger teams doing many more things. Which kind of...
Published 07/25/22
In this episode, we talk with Alan and Esteban from Android Studio about the new "Live Edit" feature recently launched at Google I/O in the Electric Eel canary build. We dive into the technology -- how it works, what the technical challenges are, and its current state. Chet with Esteban and Alan on the top row, Romain and Tor below   Links: https://goo.gle/3QmMVPV    Alan: @acleung Esteban: @estebandlc Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye
Published 06/08/22
In this episode we chat with Jon and Andrew from the Play team about the Play Store app. The Play Store recently went through a major refactoring of their app, and Jon and Andrew will guide you through the reasons why they did it, the impact on their architecture, what problems they ran into, and why they decided to adopt Jetpack Compose for the UI layer. Jon, Romain, Andrew, Tor, and Chet   Links: On Play Store adopting Jetpack Compose Guide to app architecture Jetpack libraries to...
Published 05/03/22
In this episode we chat with Derek and Brian from the Skia team about Skia, pixel shaders, and the new “AGSL” API that lets you provide pixel shaders for advanced graphics effects, which was recently added to the preview release of Android T. If you’re interested in graphics technology, this is the episode for you.  If you’re not interested in graphics... you should be.   Brian, Romain Derek Chet, Tor   Links: Skia's SkSL/AGSL playground & debugger → https://goo.gle/3DHFJYm ...
Published 04/05/22
In this episode we chat with Rahul and Leland from the Android toolkit team about "baseline profiles", a new mechanism which lets applications ship with profiling metadata used at application install time to make it start faster. We discuss how this is used in Jetpack Compose, cloud profiles in general, and more. Chet, Romain, Rahul, Leland and Tor   Links: Baseline Profile DAC Documentation  Android Developers Blog Post on baseline profiles Jetpack Macrobenchmarking Library   ...
Published 02/25/22
In this episode, Clara (Android Toolkit), Florina (Android Developer Relations), and Daniel (Android Product Management) join your usual hosts to talk about large screens, what they are and what they mean for app developers. You will also learn about the resources at your disposal to build high quality experiences on large screen devices: from samples and guidance to canonical layouts and new APIs such as window size classes Romain, Clara, Florina, Daniel, Chet, and Tor   Links: Large...
Published 02/01/22