Reader, view the highlights of Android development in 2020

The latest news for Android developers

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December 2020

What's your Modern Android Development (MAD) score? Find out!

This year we shared the Android team’s recommended set of development tools, APIs, language, and distribution technologies to help you be more productive and create better apps. We call these recommendations Modern Android Development (MAD). As an end of year surprise, we've created a plugin for Android Studio so you can see (and share) just how modern an Android developer you are. Get your scorecard now!

If you’re interested in boosting your MAD score, check out the MAD Skills video series to learn our tips and best practices for app development.

See your MAD scorecard

New version & naming for Android Studio & Android Gradle plugin

We released Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) on the canary channel, together with Android Gradle plugin (AGP) version 7.0.0-alpha01. We are adjusting the version numbering of Android Studio and our Gradle plugin by decoupling the Gradle plugin from the Android Studio versioning scheme, and bringing you more clarity to which year and IntelliJ version Android Studio aligns with for each release.

2020 Android development highlights

As this year reaches an end, we wanted to thank you for building experiences on the Android platform, and for contributing to the ecosystem. This year we focused on building and improving development tools and frameworks to help you be more efficient and productive, and we shared our recommendations and best practices to help you create better apps. The following are some of this year’s highlights:

Android 11

This year’s release of Android featured people-centric conversations, device controls, and privacy updates. Read more about all of the changes, and watch the Android 11 playlist to learn how you can get your apps to take advantage of Android 11's capabilities.

Android Studio

Android Studio 4.1 includes a new Database Inspector for querying your app’s database, support for navigating projects that use Dagger and Hilt for dependency injection, and better support for on-device machine learning. Read the announcement and watch the video to learn about all of the changes.

Learn more

Upgrade to 4.1

Jetpack libraries

This year we’ve continued to release and update the Android Jetpack libraries to help you reduce boilerplate code and follow development best practices. Some highlights:

ConstraintLayout 2.0.4

WorkManager 2.4.0

DrawerLayout Version 1.1.0

Navigation 2.3.2

Lifecycle 2.2.0

Jetpack Compose

Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern UI toolkit with native access to the platform APIs, was released to Alpha earlier this year. Learn how you can get started with Compose with the following resources:

Announcement blog post

Kotlin

This year we created new beginner training content, and made our existing content more useful and accessible. We declared coroutines as the official recommended solution for async task management, and partnered with JetBrains to release Kotlin 1.4.

Google Play

This year, we redesigned the Google Play Console to be easier to use and more helpful, added new publishing features to help you release with confidence, and made improvements to the Android App Bundle.

Learn more

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Reader, view the highlights of Android development in 2020

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Reader, get your MAD Skills videos, Kotlin safety features, and Jetpack libraries

Reader, read our updates for Android Studio

Reader, Android 11 is now live

Reader, Jetpack Compose Alpha is here!

Hey Reader, Android 11 Beta 3 is live

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