All About Android Development In 2018

All About Android Development In 2018

What happened to Android Development in 2018?

Android has changed a lot in 2018. Let's see what actually happened in 2018.

Four major categories in which Google has released new things in Android in 2018 are as follows:

  • Development
  • Distribution
  • Engagement
  • IOT Devices

Let's see all of them one by one in detail.

Development

In 2018, Google has tried to make the Android development easy and fast. In order to make development easy, Google has done the following in 2018:

  • Google released Android Jetpack . Android Jetpack is built to make app development fast. It is the next generation of Android components which brings together the benefits of the support library, backward compatibility and immediate updates to a larger set of components. Android Jetpack manages activities like background tasks, navigation, and lifecycle management, so you can eliminate boilerplate code and focus on what makes your app great. Android Jetpack is designed to work well with Kotlin , saving you even more code with Android KTX.

  • They released more libraries like WorkManager , Paging, Navigation, and Slices under the new Android Jetpack Components to make your life easier.
  • Google released Android KTX . Android KTX is a set of Kotlin extensions that is part of the Android Jetpack family. It optimizes Jetpack and Android platform APIs for Kotlin use. The purpose of Android KTX is to make Android development with Kotlin more concise, pleasant, and idiomatic by leveraging Kotlin language features such as extension functions/properties, lambdas, named parameters, and parameter default values.
  • Google released the Material Componets for Android : Now build beautiful, usable products using Material Components for Android.
  • Google released Flutter 1.0 : Flutter allows you to build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase.

Distribution

This year in 2018, Google has done so many things to make the distribution of Android Apps easy and better for developers. Google has done the following things in 2018:

  • Google released Android App Bundle : A new publishing format has been introduced for Android applications called Android App Bundle. It is a new upload format that includes all your app’s compiled code and resources, but defers APK generation and signing to Google Play. Traditionally, Android apps are distributed using a special file called an Android Package(.apk).
  • Dynamic features via the Android App Bundle : The Android App Bundle also enables modularization so that you can deliver features on-demand, instead of during install.
  • Google Play Console: New features and reports in the Play Console will help you improve your app's performance and grow your business. Read about the improvements to the dashboard, statistics, Android vitals, pre-launch report, acquisition report, and subscriptions dashboard. You can also upload, test, and publish apps using our new publishing format, the Android App Bundle .
  • Google Play Instant is now available for game developers. Also the Google Play Instant is now available on over 1 billion devices worldwide from the Play Store, search, social and most places you can tap a link.

Engagement

To engage the users on the Android platform, Google has done two major things in 2018 which are as follows:

  • Google released Actions : With App Actions, your app can be recommended to users as a way to fulfill their needs, right at the moment when they need it the most. By registering your app to handle one or more user intents, users will be able to see and interact with your app across multiple Google and Android surfaces.
  • Google released Slices : Slices are UI templates that can display rich, dynamic, and interactive content from your app from within the Google Search app and later in other places like the Google Assistant. Slices can help users perform tasks faster by enabling engagement outside of the fullscreen app experience. You can build Slices as enhancements to App Actions . Support for Slices is built into Android Jetpack and can extend all the way back to Android 4.4, reaching approximately 95% of all Android users.

IOT Devices

Google released the 1.0 version of Android Things.

Android Things is Google's managed OS that enables you to build and maintain Internet of Things devices at scale. They provide a robust platform that does the heavy lifting with certified hardware, rich developer APIs, and secure managed software updates using Google's back-end infrastructure, so you can focus on building your product.

These were all about the Android Development in 2018.

That's it for now.