What Every Android Developer Needs to Know About Google I/O 2016

Notifications

Android Wear 2.0 contains both a visual update for notifications and new expanded notifications allowing you to provide additional content and actions to your users.

Keep an eye on the Material Design for Wearables for more information on notification design and best practices, and keep in mind that as Android Wear 2.0 is still just a developer preview, these guidelines may change.

For more detailed info and to find the developer preview, watch this Google I/O session on “What’s new in Android Wear 2.0” and check out developer.android.com.

Firebase

Firebase is a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) and cloud services company that launched in 2012 with a realtime cloud database. Google acquired Firebase in 2014 and in the time since has grown from 110,000 users to over 450,000.

Google I/O 2016 marked another huge leap for Firebase as it has expanded to become a unified app development platform with more features and services. Quite a few of these services are actually familiar Google services that have been integrated into and rebranded with Firebase.

Firebase: Analytics

At the core of the new Firebase is a new analytics solution which gives you a single dashboard for analyzing both user behaviors and demographics as well as your advertising and marketing. Furthermore, the intention is that these analytics will be used in conjunction with other Firebase tools and features.

Firebase: Develop

Before the announcement at Google I/O, Firebase offered a realtime database, user authentication, and hosting to developers. Now it has added the following offerings:

• Cloud Messaging: an integration and rebranding of Google Cloud Messaging to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM).
• Storage: backed by Google Cloud and allows developers to securely upload and download large files such as images and video.
• Remote Config: allows developers to perform “instantly-updatable” changes to app behavior through customization variables.
• Test Lab: Google Cloud Test lab integrated as Firebase Test Lab for Android.
• Crash Reporting: as the name implies, generates reports on app crashes to help in finding and fixing problems. For those of us currently using Crashlytics, it will be interesting to see how this product evolves.

Firebase: Grow/Earn

• Notifications: provides a console for pushing notifications to users by leveraging FCM APIs.
• App Indexing: rebranding of Google App Indexing used to include app content in Google searches.
• Dynamic Links: “smart URLs” that allow deep linking into app content and personalizing content; they also are meant to survive if a user has to first install the application before proceeding to the link’s target.
• Invites: provides user sharing of content or referral codes via SMS or email.
• AdWords: Google’s long-running advertising service is now integrated with Firebase as well.
• AdMob: Like AdWords, AdMob, Google’s mobile advertising platform, also is now integrated with Firebase.

As you can see, Firebase seems to have changed to an essentially “All the Things” application platform. Something to note is that developers can choose which of these features to include so your app does not have to be as big as “All the Things” to take advantage of Firebase.

For the full scoop, head over to the firebase.google.com.

Instant Apps

For me, one of the most intriguing announcements from both a UX and a development perspective is the new Android Instant Apps project. Instant Apps aims to ease the process of bringing new users into your app.

As noted in the Android Developers Blog introductory post on Instant Apps, if you think about the web, it takes a single click to take new users to a new website. On mobile platforms, your users must explicitly download your entire app to be able to experience it.

Instant Apps aims to change this and bring users more easily into your app by reducing what Google calls “install friction.” Via Instant Apps, a user could tap once on a deep link to specific content within your app and only those components necessary to display that content would be downloaded and launched.

Users could then have the option of installing your entire app from the downloaded components, or they could just finish viewing and/or interacting with your content and leave without any residue of your application.

For now, most of us developers have to wait to utilize Instant Apps, but we do know that:

• Instant Apps are still native Android apps.
• Instant Apps will be properly integrated with payment and authentication.
• Adding Instant Apps functionality is done through upgrading existing apps: it does not require a separate app.
• Instant Apps will be backwards compatible all the way back to Jelly Bean (4.1).

Google says that “it can take less than a day” to upgrade apps to Instant Apps, but that comes with a “your mileage may vary” caveat. It seems that the relative ease with which you can upgrade depends largely on the structure and modularity of your existing app. I am looking forward to see what else Google has to say about Instant Apps, but there is still much to figure out in terms of how Instant Apps will jive with more complex applications.

For now we will have to wait and see, and you can keep an eye on g.co/InstantApps for further updates.

Android Studio

Okay, so a lot of the Google I/O 2016 announcements I have covered so far are still off in the far future, like Instant Apps. Some things are particular to specific types of apps, like Daydream and Android Wear 2.0. However, one thing for which every Android developer can cheer is a bunch of new features for the Android Studio 2.2 Preview!

A few months ago, I took at look at slew of new features in Android Studio 2.0. Not to rest on their laurels, the Android Tools team announced a whole bunch of new features and tools at Google I/O to take our productivity up to 11. This was easily my favorite session, and from the cheers in the audience, I don’t think I’m alone in that. Here’s what had us in the audience applauding:

Design

Android Studio 2.2 introduces a whole new way of building layouts with the new Layout Editor, which includes drag-and-drop addition of widgets to a layout, a new blueprint mode that details the spacing and arrangement of widgets, a properties panel for easily changing widget properties, and the ability to edit menus and system preferences files.

To accompany the powerful new visual editor, there is also the brand new ConstraintLayout. While it may sound similar to the RelativeLayout, ConstraintLayout helps you reduce the number of nested layouts that you need to implement your UI while still being high-performing and adaptive to different screen sizes and orientations. It was designed to work with the Layout Editor and the constraints inference engine, which automatically generates constraints for you using machine learning. ConstraintLayout is distributed as a support library and is backwards compatible back to API 9.

A third new layout design tool is the Layout Inspector which allows you to drill down into your view hierarchy and examine the attributes of each view. Furthermore, Android Studio can now give you information on the default font size of a view as inherited from the theme of the layout.