Now in Android #76

Happy February and welcome to a new episode of Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.

The double releases of stable and experimental Webkit APIs allow more fine grain control for developers and interactive features for users.

In Webkit 1.6.0, a new ProcessGlobalConfig API has been added to give you more control over every WebView in your app.

Additionally, there are new APIs in CookieManagerCompat and WebSettingsCompat, which retrieves all attributes for all cookies set on a specific URL and explicitly sends the app package name in the X-Requested-With header to allowlisted origins respectively.

For devices that are managed by enterprise policy, WebSettingsCompat has new methods to enable/disable the effect of EnterpriseAuthenticationAppLinkPolicy if set by admin in WebView, and to get the current setting. This feature lets WebView open an Authentication app instead of opening the authentication URL.

In Webkit Version 1.7.0-alpha01, We are adding support for Image drag in WebView.

This release brings support to Kotlin 1.8.0 and turns off intrinsic remember. Among other improvements, with this release ImmutableCollection and their Persistent siblings are now considered stable.

Just by upgrading to Activity 1.7.0-alpha04, the Photo Picker contracts have been upgraded to also support a Google Play services’ delivered Photo Picker, thus bringing the Photo Picker to many more devices!

We are introducing the EmojiPicker which provides consistent user experience with the latest emojis across Android OS OEM devices and apps. It provides the latest emoji support and emoji picker UI including skin-tone variants and emoji compat support.

We’ve heard your feedback on needing to have more control and flexibility over the Playstore review process. As such, we are rolling out a new section in the Play Console to address the feedback. We posted more details about the changes in the Play Console in our blog.

Takeshi Hagikura wrote about how to use Crashlytics issue reports directly in Android Studio with the new App Quality Insights. This feature is available from Android Studio Electric Eel which went stable recently.

Alex Vanyo wrote about why using exact measurement in custom layout tests may result in flaky tests depending on test devices and how you can avoid the issue. Read the post to avoid these problems in your tests.

Yuichi Araki wrote about how to create backward compatible edge-to-edge experiences for your apps. This article covers consideration from API 19 and provides implementation that should work for most apps.

In Episode 194: Subtext, Siyamed Sinir and Sean McQuillan from the Android Text team joins Chet, Tor, and Romain to talk about text, including everything from the fundamentals of the text stack on Android to the capabilities and implementation of text in Jetpack Compose to internationalization to fonts to emojis to performance.

That’s it for this week with a new version of Webkit, Compose Compiler, Activity, Emoji Picker, articles about the Play Console update, App Quality Insights with Crashlytics, density devices and flaky test, backward compatible edge-to-edge experience, a new episode of the Android Developers Backstage, and more!

Come back to the next episode of Now in Android for another update from the Android developer universe.