Posted by Stephanie Cuthbertson, Director, Product Management
Editor’s note: The global community of Android developers has always been a powerful force in shaping the direction of the Android platform; each and every voice matters to us. We have cancelled the virtual launch event to allow people to focus on important discussions around racial justice in the United States. Instead, we are releasing the Android 11 Beta today in a much different form, via short-form videos and web pages that you can consume at your own pace when the time is right for you. Millions of developers around the world build their business with Android, and we're releasing the Beta today to continue to support these developers with the latest tools. We humbly thank those who are able to offer their feedback on this release.
Today, we’re unwrapping the Beta release for Android 11 as well as the latest updates for developers from Kotlin coroutines, to progress on the Jetpack Compose toolkit, to faster builds in Android Studio, even a refreshed experience for the Play Console.
You’ve been helping us with feedback on the Android 11 developer previews since February, and today we released the first Beta of Android 11 focused on three key themes: People, Controls, and Privacy.
People: we’re making Android more people-centric and expressive, reimagining the way we have conversations on our phones, and building an OS that can recognize and prioritize the most important people in your life:
Controls: the latest release of Android can now help you can quickly get to all of your smart devices and control them in one space:
Privacy: In Android 11, we’re giving users even more control over sensitive permissions and working to keep devices more secure through faster updates.
Developer friendliness: We want to make it easy for developers to take advantage of the new release, so to make compat testing easier, we’ve:
Android 11 also includes a number of other developer productivity improvements like wireless ADB debugging, ADB incremental for faster installs of large APKs, and more nullability annotations on platform APIs (to catch issues at build time instead of runtime), and more.
The first Beta for Android 11 is available today, with final SDK and NDK APIs and new features to try in your apps. If you have a Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 device, enroll here to get Android 11 Beta updates over-the-air. As always, downloads for Pixel and the Android Emulator are also available. To learn about all of the developer features in Android 11, visit the Android 11 developer site.
Over the past several years, the Android team has been hard at work improving the mobile developer experience, to make you more productive. This includes the Android Studio IDE, a great language (Kotlin!), Jetpack libraries to make common tasks easy, and Android App Bundles to improve app distribution. Today we call this modern Android development - bringing you the best of Android to make you as efficient and productive as possible.
Today, we released new features in Android Studio 4.1 Beta and 4.2 Canary, focused on a number of crucial asks from developers:
Try out the latest: Android Studio 4.1 Beta and Android Studio 4.2 Canary.
Languages and libraries are a major area of investment in modern Android development, with Kotlin’s modern, concise language and Jetpack’s opinionated powerful libraries all focused around making you more productive.
With the rise in Kotlin adoption (with over 70% of top 1000 apps on Google Play now using Kotlin) and so many developers using Kotlin, we can now use it to simplify your experience in new ways. Kotlin coroutines are a language feature of Kotlin which make concurrent calls much easier to write and understand. We’re making coroutines our official recommendation, and we’ve built coroutines support into 3 of the most-used Jetpack libraries -- Lifecycle, WorkManager, and Room -- so you can write even better code.
Kotlin itself also continues to get better with every release, thanks to the awesome team at Jetbrains. Kotlin 1.4 provides faster code completion, more powerful type inference enabled by default, function interfaces, as well as helpful quality of life improvements like mixing named and positioning arguments.
We also continue to push Jetpack forward - a suite of libraries which spans multiple Android releases and is designed to make common mobile development patterns fast and easy. Many of us have long loved Dagger, so we worked with the Dagger team to bring you Hilt, a developer-friendly wrapper on top of Dagger, as a recommended Dependency Injection solution for Android. You’ll find this in alpha ready to try out. We’ve also added a second new library App Startup, to help both app developers and library developers improve app startup time by optimizing initialization of libraries. We have many more updates to existing libraries as well, including a major update to Paging 3, rewritten Kotlin-first with full support for coroutines!
There’s one more thing you need to be super productive — and that’s a powerful UI toolkit to quickly and easily build beautiful UIs on Android, with native access to the platform APIs. That’s why we’re building Jetpack Compose, our new modern UI toolkit that brings your app to life with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs.
Today we are launching Jetpack Compose Developer Preview 2, packed with features developers have been asking us for:
We've also added a number of new capabilities to Android Studio 4.2, in close partnership with Jetbrains Kotlin team, to help you build apps with Compose:
Compose isn’t ready for production use yet, in particular as we finish performance optimizations, but we’d love you to give it a try and share feedback. We plan to launch Alpha this summer and 1.0 next year.
Google Play is focused on helping developers grow their business. With that mission in mind, we've redesigned the Google Play Console to help you maximize your success on our platform. In addition to being clearer and easier to use, we've added features to help you:
Learn more about the new Google Play Console in this post or join the beta now at play.google.com/console. Your feedback helps us continue to improve Google Play Console for everyone, so please let us know what you think.
But there’s so much more we’re launching that we didn’t get to talk about!
Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering
When we started planning Android 11, we didn’t expect the kinds of changes that would find their way to all of us, across nearly every region in the world. These have challenged us to stay flexible and find new ways to work together, especially with our developer community.
To help us meet those challenges we’re announcing an update to our release timeline. We’re bringing you a fourth Developer Preview today and moving Beta 1 to June 3. And to tell you all about the release and give you the technical resources you need, we’re hosting an online developer event that we’re calling #Android11: the Beta Launch Show.
While the circumstances prevent us from joining together with you in-person at Shoreline Amphitheatre for Google I/O, our annual developer conference, we’re organizing an online event where we can share with you all the best of what’s new in Android. We hope you’ll join us for #Android11: The Beta Launch Show, your opportunity to find out what’s new in Android from the people who build Android. Hosted by me, Dave Burke, we’ll be kicking off at 11AM ET on June 3. And we’ll be wrapping it up with a post-show live Q&A; tweet your #AskAndroid questions to get them answered live!
Later that day, we’ll be sharing a number of talks on a range of topics from Jetpack Compose to Android Studio and Google Play–talks that we had originally planned for Google I/O–to help you take advantage of the latest in Android development. You can sign-up to receive updates on this digital event at developer.android.com/android11.
Our industry moves really fast, and we know that many of our device-maker partners are counting on us to help them bring Android 11 to new consumer devices later this year. We also know that many of you have been working to prioritize early app and game testing on Android 11, based in part on our Platform Stability and other milestones. At the same time, all of us are collaborating remotely and prioritizing the well-being of our families, friends and colleagues.
So to help us meet the needs of the ecosystem while being mindful of the impacts on our developers and partners, we’ve decided to add a bit of extra time in the Android 11 release schedule. We’re moving out Beta 1 and all subsequent milestones by about a month, which gives everyone a bit more room but keeps us on track for final release later in Q3.
Here are some of the key changes in the new schedule:
By bringing you the final APIs on the original timeline while shifting the other dates, we’re giving you an extra month to compile and test with the final APIs, while also ensuring that you have the same amount of time between Platform Stability and the final release, planned for later in Q3. Here’s a look at the timeline.
You can read more about what the new timeline means to app developers in the preview program overview.
The schedule change adds some extra time for you to test your app for compatibility and identify any work you’ll need to do. We recommend releasing a compatible app update by Android 11 Beta on June 3rd to get feedback from the larger group of Android Beta users who will be getting the update.
With Beta 1 the SDK and NDK APIs will be final, and as we reach Platform Stability in July, the system behaviors and non-SDK greylists will also be finalized. At that time, plan on doing your final compatibility testing and releasing your fully compatible app, SDK, or library as soon as possible so that it is ready for the final Android 11 release. You can read more in the timeline for developers.
You can start compatibility testing today on a Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 device, or you can use the Android Emulator. Just flash the latest build, install your current production app, and test the user flows. Make sure to review the behavior changes for areas where your app might be affected. There’s no need to change the app’s targetSdkVersion at this time, although we recommend evaluating the work since many changes apply once your app is targeting the new API level.
Today we're pushing a Developer Preview 4 with the latest bug fixes, API tweaks, and features to try in your apps. It’s available by manual download and flash for Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 devices, and if you’re already running a Developer Preview build, you’ll get an over-the-air (OTA) update to today’s release.
For complete information on Android 11, visit the Android 11 developer site, and please continue to let us know what you think!
