The Android team announced a number of new and improved releases at this year’s Android Dev Summit intended to foster “modern android development.” The announcements included optimizations for the Kotlin language, a Jetpack Compose developer preview, and the Android Studio 4.0 Canary IDE. 

“We call our recommendation ‘modern Android development.’ Opinionated and powerful, for fast, easy development. Taking away everything that slows you down so you can focus on building incredible experiences,” Stephanie Cuthbertson, director of product management for the Android tea, wrote in a blog post. “Kotlin and Compose are especially great recent examples [of modern Android development]. Kotlin is a modern, concise language–something you asked us for and is now the recommended language for Android. Compose is a modern declarative UI toolkit built for the next 10 years,” 

New features in Jetpack include a tool that allows users to build apps with less code; benchmarking; a library that makes it easier to measure performance of an app; Viewbinding to access Views from the code; and CameraX (available in beta in December).

The developer preview of the new Jetpack Compose tool is meant to provide a declarative way to build UIs for native apps, Cuthbertson explained. 

Also new in Android Studio 4.0: compose live preview, code completion, a full sample of a Compose app, the new motion editor, Java 8 language desugaring, and Kotlin live templates. 

In addition, Google announced that Android App Bundles and Dynamic Delivery are much easier to test. Users can now grant anyone in the team ability to upload artifacts. And starting today, launching offline testing of dynamic delivery with the fake split install manager so can replicate splits being installed by the Play Store while testing locally is possible. 

When it comes to safety on Google Play, Android restricted SMS/Call log permissions to only apps that need them as part of their core functionality, and as a result 98% fewer apps access this sensitive data.

“User trust and safety has always been a top priority at Google Play, with human reviewers, constant improvements to play protect, and policy updates to evolve with the threats we see,” Cuthbertson wrote. 

More details are available here.