UPDATED 15:35 EDT / MAY 18 2021

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At I/O, Google debuts Android 12 beta with new design, Wear OS and more

Android 12, the Google LLC mobile operating system now used in some 3 billion active devices worldwide, today debuted in beta test mode with a new design, developer tools and updates to the Android-based WearOS software for wearable devices.

The updates came today at the virtual but live Google I/O 2021 developer conference, where the company also revealed new features for Android Studio, the Kotlin programming language, the Jetpack’s code library suite and more.

The Android 12 Beta brings to the forefront personalization and does so through design elements and user interface, giving users a greater ability to control how the user interface looks and feels than ever before. The beta is now available on Pixel phones as well as other Android-capable devices.

Android 12 is one of our most ambitious releases ever,” Sameer Samat (pictured), Google vice president of product management, said during the conference keynote. “It’s the biggest design change in years. We’ve overhauled everything from the lock screen to systems settings.”

Wear OS gets big updates

Android development is taking big steps forward for wearables today with Wear OS, as Google announced a unified platform built jointly with Samsung. It will combine the best of Wear OS and Tizen, a mobile OS used primarily by Samsung. Second, there will be new experiences with Google apps. Third, a new health and fitness service from Google-owned Fitbit is coming to the platform.

As for the nuts and bolts, developers will find the Jetpack news ties back to Wear OS with a release of Jetpack Tiles API, which will allow them to create custom Tiles on all devices in the Wear ecosystem. These are widget-face UIs that can be switched through with an easy swipe that allows app access.

The new Health and Fitness APIs collaboration with Samsung will hook into data collection from sensors on wearables to provide accurate monitoring of health data – such as heart rate and calories and daily distance walked – all collected to a trusted source. All of this can be tooled together with Android Studio Arctic Fox Beta.

It’s also possible for Android Studio to emulate sensors, such as heartbeat monitoring, so that developers can easily create health apps. For example, a developer could make a health app that could suggest Spotify playlists based on the user’s current average heart rate for exercise routines.

Another feature of the Wear OS ecosystem will mean that users will have an easier time with updates and discoverability as well, with updates to Google Play. More information is available on this blog post on the subject.

Android Studio Arctic Fox

The latest beta release of Android Studio Arctic Fox 2020.3.1, an integrated development editor for creating powerful code, also debuted today. The updated suite of tools is designed to user interface design, extend apps to new devices and boost developer productivity.

Compose tooling in Arctic Fox can allow developers to create modern UIs and create responsive elements. There are also tools for providing test results across multiple devices and optimizing debugging databases and background tasks with the App inspector.

Apps are now more accessible with the Accessibility Scanner and more performant with Memory Profiler. More information about Android Studio Arctic Fox updates is available on Google’s blog.

Kotlin gets Symbol Processing

Kotlin Symbol Processing, now available today, is a powerful but simple parsing solution for Kotlin code that allows speeds up to two times faster with libraries like Room. It has a lightweight application programming interface that can be used to develop lightweight compiler plugins. It uses a simplified, but powerful Kotlin grammar while keeping the learning curve at a minimum.

Kotlin is now the most-used language used by professional Android developers. It is included in 80% of the top 1,000 apps and it is also put to heavy use in more than 70 of the top Google apps, including Drive, Home, Maps and Play.

Android Jetpack gets efficiency updates

Today, Google updated its Android Jetpack libraries to reduce “jank,” which is what happens when apps suffer a little stutter when trying to start cold or read a lot of data from the cache.

To solve this, Google is unpacking Macrobenchmark in alpha to capture large interactions efficiently. A new Kotlin Coroutines API for persisting data more efficiently called DataStore in beta is also being released.

More than 84% of the top 10,000 apps are now using the Jetpack library to keep their code running smoothly. For more information, Google has provided a blog post on the subject.

Photo: Google

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