LYLA FUJIWARA: Hello.
Welcome to the Android Dev
Summit 2019 and very first
ever #AskAndroid livestream.
I'm Lyla Fujiwara and I'm an
Android developer advocate.
DAN GALPIN: And I'm Dan Galpin,
also an Android developer
advocate and I am
Lyla's manager, which
means I'm ultimately responsible
for everything that I say
and everything that she says.
LYLA FUJIWARA: Yep.
[LAUGHS]
All right.
So let's get to it.
All summit long,
the #AskAndroid team
will be answering your questions
on form factors, Jetpack
Compose, Kotlin, coroutines,
[INAUDIBLE] community,
architecture components,
Android 10, and so much more.
TOR NORBYE: How about tools?
DAN GALPIN: Yeah,
Android Studio.
LYLA FUJIWARA: And tools,
which is happening right now.
DAN GALPIN: All right.
So if you already have
a burning question
or you're excited
about something
you saw in the keynote, well,
there's no need to wait.
Tweet at #AskAndroid for a
chance to see your questions
answered live during the
Android Developer Summit.
LYLA FUJIWARA: And you can
also put your questions
on the livestream.
DAN GALPIN: Yes.
LYLA FUJIWARA: So either way.
OK.
So finally, a big
shout out to everybody
that's participating
on the livestream
from around the world.
I have a few countries here--
Bangladesh, welcome Kenya,
Congo, Brazil, Indonesia,
Germany, Netherlands,
Pakistan, India, Nepal,
Mexico, and the faraway
land of Palo Alto.
DAN GALPIN: We have a
jam-packed show for you today,
so let's get rolling.
LYLA FUJIWARA: All right.
So first up, I think we
already got a sneak peak,
but we're chatting
with Chet and Tor.
TOR NORBYE: Now in that
order, Chet and Tor.
LYLA FUJIWARA:
Yes, Chet and Tor.
DAN GALPIN: So Tor is the
tech lead for Android Studio,
and he's our demo master, while
Chet leads scalable outreach
for Android after a long
stint leading the Toolkit team
and is an expert in graphics,
UI performance, and donuts.
CHET HAASE: Especially donuts.
DAN GALPIN: You can
catch both of them
regularly on the Android
Developers Backstage
podcast, which means
they both love to talk.
So let's welcome Chet and Tor.
TOR NORBYE: Thank you.
CHET HAASE: Thank you.
LYLA FUJIWARA: OK, so go ahead,
start asking your questions.
We've got one right off the bat.
So keynote just happened.
What was the favorite thing
that you saw from the keynote?
CHET HAASE: I like seeing more
about Compose on the screen
and seeing a little
bit more code
and how stuff is put together.
TOR NORBYE: That's it?
[LAUGHING]
CHET HAASE: Well,
I figured you were
going to add the other
part of it, which is,
yeah, yeah, yeah,
but what about?
TOR NORBYE: Well, clearly
Android Studio 4.0.
LYLA FUJIWARA: OK.
CHET HAASE: I thought
you were going to talk
about the tools for Compose.
What is Compose
without the Android--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
TOR NORBYE: It is one of the
many features in Studio 4.0.
So we actually bumped major
versions from 3.6 to 4.0,
and it's because we have
a lot of awesome features.
Compose is one of them, but
there's many other things
as well.
LYLA FUJIWARA: All right.
So both of those things, if
you want to check them out,
you have to download
Android Studio 4.0.
TOR NORBYE: That's right.
DAN GALPIN: And people can
play with the motion editor.
Is that true?
TOR NORBYE: Yes.
I think the motion editor's
enabled in Canary 1.
DAN GALPIN: Wow.
That's exciting.
All right.
So we have a question from
Andrefrsousa, which is
pronounced something like that.
"Is there a way to
change the default
Android Emulator phone
number and country code?"
TOR NORBYE: No.
[LAUGHING]
DAN GALPIN: Well,
that's a good question.
I like that.
TOR NORBYE: I asked the team.
There isn't, and their question
was, why do you want that?
So if it's a--
DAN GALPIN: So we
need to tweet back
at him, why do you want that?
CHET HAASE: They
know this is not
a back-and-forth
conversation, right?
DAN GALPIN: Yeah.
CHET HAASE: It's kind
of a one-way stream.
TOR NORBYE: You know,
if we add a setting
for every possible
one user request,
it will be kind
of a mess of a UI,
so we try to make
sure that there's
a really good use case for it.
So if someone would
make that case,
then we would consider it.
LYLA FUJIWARA: So Htorrex
asks, "When are you
planning to have a stable
version of ViewPager2?
DAN GALPIN: Oh.
CHET HAASE: Good time
to ask that question.
So it was alpha for
quite a long time.
It's been in several
beta releases,
and the hope is that it goes to
RC real soon now, which means
exactly that, real soon now.
And then at RC, the
expectation for RC in general
is that is basically
the stable build.
We want one last
sanity check, so I
would expect stable to fast
follow sometime after that.
LYLA FUJIWARA: All right, sweet.
DAN GALPIN: OK.
We've got some questions
that are coming in
from the livestream and, "Any
app security measurement tool
coming in Android Studio?
TOR NORBYE: Generally, we
don't talk about future plans
that we haven't announced.
DAN GALPIN: Ah, OK there we go.
So maybe, maybe not.
And that was from [INAUDIBLE].
TOR NORBYE: I have no
announcement at this time.
[LAUGHING]
DAN GALPIN: That's a very
secure way of putting that.
I like that.
CHET HAASE: The
advice that I tend
to give in a Fireside
Chat, which we're
going to have another
one of this afternoon,
is if your question has
words in it like "will you"
or "is the team going
to" or "will there
be a feature," like--
TOR NORBYE: Or when.
CHET HAASE: You're not
going to get joy out
of the answer to that question.
LYLA FUJIWARA: OK.
So that in mind,
Jonathan_cps asks,
"Are you guys working on
a tool to show a preview
screen for Jetpack Compose?"
TOR NORBYE: Yes.
So I guess that question was
submitted before the keynote,
because we just
gave a demo of it.
So yes, a preview is
one of the core features
of our Compose tooling
in Android Studio 4.0.
LYLA FUJIWARA: All right, cool.
DAN GALPIN: OK, so
here's a question.
What is your favorite feature
in Android Studio 4.0?
TOR NORBYE: Can I
reinterpret that to,
what are your top
five features in 4.0?
DAN GALPIN: Yeah,
absolutely, please.
TOR NORBYE: Because it's
very difficult to choose one,
plus I'll probably make
some enemies on the team.
DAN GALPIN: I was going
to say, plus, this way,
you can actually pitch multiple
features to our audience,
so this is great.
TOR NORBYE: Exactly.
So in my top five, the
first one I would say
is the build profiler, which
we didn't show in the keynote.
So there's going to
be a demo later today.
DAN GALPIN: Ah, there we go.
Nice.
TOR NORBYE: But
it's basically going
to let you see, profile
your build to find out
what your potential
mistakes are and how
to optimize it to run faster.
CHET HAASE: So just to give
a little more information,
I assume that
builds on what we've
been seeing for a while, which
is, as it's doing builds,
it's actually telling
you how long it
took to do each of those steps.
Right?
So you're just getting
this in a more visual way?
TOR NORBYE: Yeah,
but it's not just
about showing you how
long each task took.
We are looking-- for example,
we've instrumented more stuff
into the build system, and we're
looking for potential mistakes.
So we can tell you,
for example, hey,
this task it's always running.
It's not looking at
its inputs, so that
means that it will always
run, even incrementally.
CHET HAASE: So analysis as well.
TOR NORBYE: So we're basically
pinpointing a lot of analysis,
saying, here's a problem,
here's a problem,
here's how to fix it.
So build attribution is one,
motion editor's another one.
You saw that in the keynote.
It's a pretty great feature
people have been waiting for.
Compose tooling, of
course, is there.
My second most
favorite, I would say,
is having the embedded emulator.
So we had a little
bit of a slip-up
in the demo in the keynote, but
it's a really great feature.
And it's just so
much more convenient
to be able to have the emulator
participate in the window
management of the ID without
having to sort of juggle
top-level windows.
LYLA FUJIWARA: Yeah.
I have an emulator that opens
up on a separate screen a lot
of the time, so--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
TOR NORBYE: And then
layout inspector, which
has a lot of new features for--
it's a bit like
the Chrome DevTools
where you can sort
of track down,
why is this font
size the way it is,
or what is the paint
hierarchy looking like?
Why do I have a clipping bug?
CHET HAASE: Yeah I
like the 3D thing.
We saw a little bit of that in
the demo in the keynote, right?
TOR NORBYE: Yeah.
And there's more
as well, so we're
going to do a 25-minute demo
later today of a bunch more
features in 4.0.
LYLA FUJIWARA: Awesome.
And while we're
still going, if you
have questions
about any of that,
please post them
to the livestream.
Speaking of which, Nora
from the livestream asks,
"Is Kotlin good for enterprise?"
CHET HAASE: Of course.
Yeah.
Actually, I gave a talk about
Kotlin language in general
at a conference a few weeks ago.
And it was a conference with
mostly non-Android developers,
and the room was packed.
I would say probably a quarter
of the people in the room
were doing Android development.
The rest of the people were
using Kotlin on the back-end,
enterprise, web, whatever.
TOR NORBYE: And of course,
I use Kotlin on the desktop.
So Kotlin is not
just for Android.
So Android Studio, we
have a lot of-- basically,
almost all the new code we write
is written in Kotlin as well,
which runs on your desktop.
LYLA FUJIWARA: Awesome.
Yeah, and we actually
have a #AskAndroid segment
about Kotlin and coroutines
that's coming up later.
And the person who is basically
helping organize Kotlin
everywhere is going
to be a part of that,
so we can answer much
more of those questions.
DAN GALPIN: Yeah.
So we've got another
question from the livestream,
comes from Llama.
"Has Android Studio
improved in terms of speed?"
TOR NORBYE: I
think, clearly, yes.
Right?
So we spent the last year
or nine months working
on something called
Project Marble, where
we focus exclusively on
performance and stability.
So there's many
aspects to speed.
I mean, if he or she
means build speed,
OK, obviously, we are
working on a profiler.
But you know, the things we
did in Project Marble was
reducing UI freezes,
reducing memory usage,
optimizing the way
we were handling
a bunch of calculations.
Overall, speed was a
big, big concern for us.
CHET HAASE: There was
some specifics called out
in the keynote as well, I think
in Caren's section, talking
about things like, will
incremental annotation
processing get faster.
Was that part of--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
TOR NORBYE: Yeah, it was.
And I think another one
that is maybe not so obvious
is that Studio is happy if
you give it more memory.
Most users actually run with
the default, which is about--
I can't remember--
1.2 gigs of RAM.
For large projects,
that's just not enough.
And so we actually give you
suggestions as part of Marble.
Hey, you should resize
your heap to something
bigger based on your machine
and your project size.
And if you accept
that suggestion,
you'll actually find
Studio running much better.
LYLA FUJIWARA: OK, cool.
All right.
So I'm just going
to do this one.
DAN GALPIN: Oh,
this one goes right
into that last thing
he was saying though.
LYLA FUJIWARA: OK, cool.
So from Twitter,
Pranayairan asks,
"With more and more
features getting
added to Android
Studio, is there
anything done to reduce
the IDE memory footprint?
With each new release, AS is
hogging more and more memory."
CHET HAASE: Requesting.
LYLA FUJIWARA: Requesting.
[INAUDIBLE] requesting
more and more memory.
TOR NORBYE: Right.
Yeah, so I just answered that.
We're working on it.
[LAUGHTER]
LYLA FUJIWARA: That's
what I thought.
Yeah, so all right.
Cool.
All right.
So yeah, I like that one.
DAN GALPIN: Down to
our last questions.
This one here?
LYLA FUJIWARA: Yeah.
DAN GALPIN: OK, so Adrian asked,
in "single or multiple activity
implementation,
which one is better?"
CHET HAASE: Tricky
question to answer.
We are recommending that
people move to single activity.
So originally, Android was
all about multiple activities.
You go from place to place
in your application flow
and new windows pop up.
It's better user
experience if you
can stay within one activity.
If you have deep
links, maybe that's
a multiple activity
navigational situation.
DAN GALPIN: All right.
LYLA FUJIWARA: OK, cool.
So I think that we are
about to wrap up, but just
with Chet and Tor, so thank
you so much for joining us.
Any last things to
say to the livestream?
CHET HAASE: Hi.
TOR NORBYE: Try Studio 4.0.
LYLA FUJIWARA: OK,
try Studio 4.0.
DAN GALPIN: Check out the
Android Developers Backstage
podcast, and submit your
questions to #AskAndroid.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
