Now in Android #80

Media 3 is ready to play! We’re pleased to announce the full release of the Jetpack Media3 library, and we encourage everyone to adopt! Media3 is the new home for APIs that let you create rich audio and video experiences. If you’ve used libraries like ExoPlayer, MediaCompat, or Media2, you’ll find Media3 to be familiar. However, instead of using these separate libraries, Media3 both provides a unified API for playback use-cases and expands to cover new use-cases like video editing and transcoding. ExoPlayer has a new home and is the default implementation of the new Player interface in Media3.

Check out the blog post for more information on the 1.0 release of Media3

As part of the Compose March ’23 Bill of Materials, we’re releasing version 1.4 of Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern, native UI toolkit that is used by apps such as Airbnb. This release contains new features like Pager and Flow Layouts, and new ways to style your text, such as hyphenation and line-break behavior. It also improves the performance of modifiers and fixes a number of bugs.

Compose now includes out-of-the-box support for vertical and horizontal paging between different content. Using VerticalPager or HorizontalPager enables similar functionality to the ViewPager in the view system. However, just like the benefits of using LazyRow and LazyColumn, you no longer need to create an adapter or fragments! You can simply embed a composable inside the Pager:

// Display 10 items
HorizontalPager(pageCount = 10) { page ->
// Your specific page content, as a composable:
Text(
text = "Page: $page",
modifier = Modifier.fillMaxWidth()
)
}

See what else is new in the Jetpack 1.4 Release here!

The MAD Skills series focused on Jetpack Compose layout and modifiers continued with a community tip from Manuel Perara, Lead Android Engineer at Bumble, who demonstrated fun designs with Lazy layouts.

And then Simona wrapped up the series, which covered everything from the basics of layouts and modifiers, to advanced concepts such as modifier chaining order and subcomposition.

But Wait! If this wasn’t enough, there’s More MAD content!

For ongoing content, be sure to check the MAD Skills playlist on YouTube, the articles on Medium, or this handy landing page that points to all of it.

Rebecca Gutteridge chatted with Annyce Davis, VP of Engineering at Meetup and Android GDE, about the impact of using Android Studio’s App Quality Insights window.

Android Studio’s App Quality Insights window enables you to discover, investigate, and reproduce issues reported by Firebase Crashlytics directly within the context of your local Android Studio project.

Check out this video snippet in #TheAndroidShow & the full blog post!

Also check out or short on What’s your favorite Android Studio AQI feature? #Shorts

Here are the most notable AndroidX releases since the previous episode:

Tyson covered an Introduction to App Startup and the do’s and don’t on the topic of “pre-warming app features”, detailing the costs of prewarming in startup time, battery life, and user retention.

Morten details Mitigating soft verification issues in R8 and D8 which sheds light on how to avoid the negative impact on runtime performance & getting your app to run a bit faster on older devices.

That’s it for this week! with the release of Media3 1.0, Jetpack Compose 1.4, the wrap of up of the MAD Skillz Compose Layouts and Modifiers, the impact of prewarming on App Startup, how to mitigate Soft Verification Issues, and more. Check back soon for the next update from the Android developer universe.