Google I/O 2019: What’s New For Developers

Jetpack Compose

This is one of those things which everyone is still waiting to learn more about, but nothing happens. Even if a few months have passed. Sadly enough, this new and cool reactive and declarative UI framework didn’t bring much more to the table. It’s still in very early pre-alpha stages and there aren’t many examples which you can follow to learn more about it. There aren’t even many tutorials or articles out there, because people still haven’t built a larger example using it. However, if anything new emerges, we’ll be the first to let you know! In the meantime, you can check out our Jetpack Compose Primer. :]

Android Studio Improvements

Five years ago, Android Studio first came out. Remember the old days of working with Eclipse? If you do, it probably gives you the chills. Thankfully, the mighty Android Studio is here now, to save the day and developer time! However, over the years you may have seen its ups and downs. With new features, and new bugs and leaks, it kept riding a painful rollercoaster. It quickly went from being the most amazing tool ever, to being too unstable to work with at times. Because of this, the tooling team stopped working on new features for more than six months! They instead focused their efforts into fixing a ton of Android Studio bugs and leaks. By doing so, they removed several hundred bugs and leaks from the IDE, drastically improving it.

Currently, Android Studio 3.5, which features these fixes, is now available! You can see a new, much faster and stable release for yourself! Not only that, but Android Studio 3.6 is in Canary 7 version, showing that the team is constantly improving the tools we use every day.

In-App Updates

Another cool user-experience feature is the ability to force or suggest application updates from within the app itself. Through the use of the In-App Updates feature of Android, you can add custom logic for when your app needs an update. Moreover, you can also say which versions are crucial to download. Using this, you can stop the user from proceeding unless they update the app to the target version. You can check this feature and its implementation by following the official documentation.

Google Assistant

Given the rapid growth of AI development and the number of virtual assistants available out there, it’s only natural that Google introduced something for the Assistant as well! There are three major improvements in the Assistant field – the HowTo templates, improved App Actions, and the Interactive Canvas. You can read more about these in detail by reading Google I/O Reactions: What is New with the Google Assistant.

HowTo Templates

Google’s amazing Assistant is becoming increasingly useful and smart. For years, it’s been helping you do things with just your voice in a drastically shorter amount of time. Amongst other things, people have used the Assistant to find good “How to”, or DIY tutorials. However, one of the problems when searching for such tutorials is the layout for the website. It can happen that the website, or the search result, is not formatted cleanly and intuitively. A good example of intuitive and user-friendly design is the DIY Networks website. All of the tutorials on it are formatted in a clean way. If you find a tutorial on their website, using the Assistant, you’ll easily be able to follow it no matter what device you’re on.

But you don’t just read tutorials on a topic, you also watch videos. This is why the Google Assistant team has prepared a special HowTo template, so you can translate video tutorials to website and Assistant-friendly content.

Improved App Actions

Back when Google first announced App Actions, it wasn’t easy to connect an Action to your app and for the Assistant to recognize which type of action you’re requesting. Because of this, the team added the four most common category types to App Actions. This will help you differentiate Actions and help the Assistant with recognizing which type of Action it’s running. These categories are:

• Health & Fitness
• Finance
• Ridesharing
• Food Ordering

Using these categories, you can separate each part of your app to a different action.

Interactive Canvas

The last thing which is related to the Assistant and Assistant-powered devices is the Interactive Canvas. The idea is for developers to be able to create interactive, full-screen applications, using a simple tool. The Canvas uses HTML, CSS and Javascript underneath. and it’s great for building full-screen immersive experiences, which the client receives as a message. One great example Google had was talking to the Assistant, and receiving an immersive, full-screen game within the chat. You can open up the game and have some fun without actually installing an app. The experience will run as a web application within the chat itself, and you can return to the chat whenever you want! Pretty cool, right? :]

Improving the Web

Google has a strong focus on web technologies, amongst other things. From the very start, they’ve been a great part of the Internet, and over time they’ve consolidated their role as a leader in the area. Which is why Google I/O couldn’t have happened without a few announcements in this section!

Speeding up Web Browsing

Google’s constantly trying to speed up web browsing with newer versions of Chrome. Since Google I/O they have introduced several things to speed up everyday web development, and web usage. One of the few things are the new Chrome and Chromium OS versions which improve website loading by a large amount, especially on low-end devices. As a small cherry on top, they’ve introduced a special flag to image HTML elements which loads images lazily for you without any extra work. You can use this by adding a flag, like so:

<img src="source.png" alt="Lazy loading rules!" loading="lazy"/>

That’s like a free piece of optimization you can add to your websites right away!

Optimizing Websites

Google has also improved their Lighthouse tool. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a tool that helps you build optimized and performant websites. By analyzing your website, you can see which areas you can improve upon, such as loading speed, amount of data you send and so on. But now, you can also set up Performance Budgets! This means you can set a budget for things like Javascript size, time until the website becomes responsive and much more. By setting such budgets, you can always keep track of if your website is performant or not, and which fields you should optimize.