Google I/O 2022 Recap: Top 5 Takeaways for Android Devs

Google I/O is a yearly event where Google makes its biggest software announcements. Google I/O 2022, which ran from May 11–12, didn’t disappoint; it offered lots of exciting new changes. If you’re wondering what the biggest news was, our Google I/O recap covers five noteworthy announcements that no Android developer should miss, including:

• Improvements to Jetpack Compose and Android Studio.
• Advancements in wearable apps and development for big screens.
• Cool features that make Android development even more fun.
• And even a replacement for your wallet!

Read on to learn about all of these cool new developments, which will surely impact your next Android project.

1. Jetpack Compose

Jetpack Compose, which is Android’s new UI toolkit for building better apps faster, got its fair share of attention at the 2022 Developer Keynote.

Jetpack Compose 1.0, the first stable and production-ready version of the toolkit, was released less than a year ago. This year’s event showed that Compose is enjoying a fast adoption rate, with over 100 of the top 1,000 apps in the Play Store now using Compose.

This shows that Google is really serious about the Jetpack Compose project. Developers should consider hopping on the declarative UI trend because it’s evident that companies are gradually adopting Compose.

Jetpack Compose 1.2 Beta

Jetpack Compose 1.2 Beta was announced at the Developer Keynote event. This update has a lot of improvements and additions that make Compose easier to use. These include:

Downloadable fonts: This new feature provides APIs that give you easy access to Google Fonts, including a fallback font setup that’s easy to use and implement. One major benefit is that downloadable fonts give you smaller APK sizes; multiple apps can even share the same fonts through a provider. This lets you save storage space and internet bandwidth for your users.

Lazy Grids: These were only an experimental feature in earlier Compose versions, but they’re now stable in Compose 1.2. This is a big improvement to creating lazy layouts in Compose because grids provide flexible layouts that adapt to different screen sizes.

Android Studio: Google has added lots of tooling for Compose 1.2 in the Android Studio Beta and Canary builds. These tools help track performance, making developing with Compose simpler. For example, you can now see how often a composable is recomposed using the Layout Inspector. You’ll read more about these features in the Android Studio section of this article.

Compose for WearOS Beta

Jetpack Compose has enjoyed massive praise from the developer community, and at Google I/O 2022, Google announced that they’ve brought it to wearable products. Compose for WearOS is now available in Beta. This is a developer preview, letting you dive in and explore the possibilities Compose offers for WearOS.

Google also announced the Google Pixel Watch. According to Google: “It’s the first watch built inside-out by Google”. It will come out this fall alongside Pixel 7. It features a new WearOS experience, according to Google. With the release of Compose for WearOS Beta and the Pixel Watch, developers can now explore the possibilities Jetpack Compose has to offer on a wearable.

Health Connect is a joint collaboration between Google and Samsung that Fitbit, Google Fit and Samsung Health are all adopting. The Health Connect API lets you share health data on Android devices securely. With the user’s consent, Health Connect gathers data from all those apps and stores it in an on-device datastore, giving the user full insight into all their fitness data. Currently in Alpha and available through the Jetpack Health API, it will launch for users later this fall.

2. Android 13 Beta

The second Beta of Android 13 was released at Google I/O 2022. It comes with new features and behavior changes, like privacy and security handling.

Productivity

Android 13 builds on Material You to offer an intuitive and adaptive UI for users. New features include new custom media controls and themed app icons — which also means that you can tint the app icons in supported Android launchers to blend in with the color of the device’s wallpaper and themes.

Another cool new productivity feature is that you can now set different languages per app. So let’s say you’re from Spain and most of the people you chat with are Spanish, but you work at an English firm. You can now set WhatsApp to be in Spanish while keeping Trello in English.

Privacy and Security

Google has made some pretty clear indications that Android developers need to change the way they’re handling permissions. For example, Android 13 features a new permission for posting notifications called POST_NOTIFICATIONS. If you’re used to using READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE, that permission has now been deprecated.

It also includes other new permissions, like NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES.

Furthermore, Android 13 comes with a new photo picker that provides a UI that blends in with your app. With the new photo picker, the user doesn’t have to give an app access to their entire library. When the photo picker launches, they simply select the specific multimedia they want to share with the app.

This gives them more privacy by limiting access to their entire library — and also means that they don’t need to declare runtime permissions.

There are a lot of privacy and security changes, so be sure to read about the new ways of handling permissions in Android before you start building your next app.

That’s Just a Few of the Android 13 Changes

There were a lot of other additions in the Android 13 release, including a more predictable back gesture, HDR video capture, spatial audio support and battery resource management features, like notifying users if apps are consuming too much battery. Reading up on these new features could be beneficial to your next app development venture.

3. Large Screens and Foldables

At Google I/O 2021, Google released Android 12L, which was a leap ahead for Android’s performance on large screens and foldable devices. This OS introduced features like column-based layouts for the system menu, multitasking and a split-screen mode, to mention a few.

Google continued on that promise, offering big changes for large screens and tablets this year. Enhancements in Android 13 make designing and building adaptive UIs a delightful experience.

Google provides three starter layouts, also called canonical layouts, which help you kick off projects with large screens in mind:

• List-detail view
• Supporting panel
• Feed

These projects are starting points for common use cases.

Also take note of some new breakpoints that help you adapt your UI based on the available space for different devices:

• Compact
• Medium
• Expanded

These predefined classes are available in the JetpackWindowManger version 1.1 library.

Other noteworthy libraries that help with building adaptive UIs include the Jetpack DragAndDrop library, which gives you helper classes to make drag and drop easier, and Slidingpanelayout, which helps you combine fragments in an intuitive way.