Get the massive image with Massive Screens at Google I/O 2024

Posted by Fahd Imtiaz, Product Supervisor, Android Developer

With Android reaching extra gadgets, from telephones to foldables to Chromebooks, constructing apps that seamlessly adapt to completely different display sizes and kinds has by no means been extra essential. At this 12 months’s Google I/O, we coated constructing adaptable apps, rising consumer productiveness with key inputs like keyboard and stylus, and scaling video games throughout surfaces.

Constructing adaptive apps

All through Google I/O 2024, we’ve talked so much about the way to construct adaptive apps. With this shift, a few of you could be asking “what makes an app actually adaptive?”

Adaptive apps reap the benefits of the total display measurement they’re on – whether or not that may be a cellphone, a pill, or a foldable. These apps regulate structure based mostly on situations, driving how your app’s structure ought to adapt. These situations embody issues like adjustments to the dimensions of the window, system posture or font measurement.

Adaptive apps dynamically regulate their layouts by swapping parts, exhibiting, or hiding content material based mostly on the accessible window measurement, in comparison with merely stretching UI components. With ever evolving type components and display sizes, adaptability to your app to any window measurement unlocks the seamless experiences customers demand at this time.

Now that what they’re, how do you get began constructing adaptive apps? We strongly advocate utilizing WindowSizeClasses because the opinionated breakpoints to your UI and we’re bringing you a wide range of new Compose APIs that make it simpler to implement frequent adaptive layouts.

Obtainable now in beta, the brand new Compose adaptive structure libraries assist you to to make your UI look good throughout window sizes. From navigation UI to record/element and supporting pane type layouts, we’re offering composables to make constructing an adaptive app simpler than ever.

Take a look at these technical periods to study extra:

Or get began by testing the brand new documentation!

Enhance consumer productiveness on pill and foldables

Tablets and foldables are nice for consuming content material however even higher relating to creating content material. That’s why leveraging enter gadgets like stylus for extra productive experiences is very necessary to your customers.

Enhancing your app’s stylus expertise

Stylus customers on Android can stay extra productive with new help for handwriting in textual content fields. You now not must put down your stylus when it is advisable enter some textual content right into a textual content subject. Stylus handwriting and gestures will work routinely if you’re utilizing customary textual content parts together with BasicTextField in Compose (1.7), EditText in Views and textual content enter components in WebView.

For stylus customers, low latency is vital to having a responsive inking expertise. Lowering latency minimizes the quantity of delay between once you transfer your stylus and when the ink seems on the display, giving customers a extra genuine pen-to-paper expertise. Based mostly on developer suggestions, we’ve launched new APIs to make low latency simpler for apps that use Canvas for rendering.

A terrific instance of those libraries in apply is Infinite Painter, the place the crew lowered their inking latency by 5x.

Enhancing productiveness with keyboard and mouse help

Subsequent to the stylus, one other important enter system is the bodily keyboard that basically shines when customers must do lots of textual content enter like lengthy emails, paperwork or weblog posts. As a developer, making it simple for customers to navigate your app with keyboard navigation can set your app aside.

Customers ought to be capable of navigate to all components in your app with simply their keyboard. It’s additionally necessary that often used keyboard shortcuts are supported in your app. To assist educate your customers about shortcuts, contemplate making your keyboard shortcuts discoverable to customers by including entries to the system KeyboardHelper.

To enhance the expertise for keyboard, mouse, trackpad, and stylus customers, we additionally advocate implementing hover states and keyboard focus. All interactive parts ought to have a hover state and will present a visible cue to point which part has the keyboard focus.

You possibly can study extra about all these enhancements and extra by way of the technical session, and our up to date documentation and codelab.

Improve productiveness with pane growth

Though bigger window sizes permit exhibiting a number of panes of content material without delay, customers usually wish to concentrate on one particular pane at a time. By following the brand new steering for pane growth, customers have the selection to see each panes without delay, or resize them as they want.

Google Calendar has added pane growth to their supporting pane structure on expanded width window sizes, permitting customers to resize to see extra particulars of an occasion, or extra info of their schedule.

Though bigger window sizes permit exhibiting a number of panes of content material without delay, customers usually wish to concentrate on one particular pane at a time. By following the brand new steering for pane growth, customers have the selection to see each panes without delay, or resize them as they want.

Google Calendar has added pane growth to their supporting pane structure on expanded width window sizes, permitting customers to resize to see extra particulars of an occasion, or extra info of their schedule.

This function shall be supported by exercise embedding in Android 15, and can also be deliberate to be supported by the material3-adaptive library.

Constructing nice video games throughout surfaces

Players recognize premium, immersive experiences and with Android tablets, foldables, desktops, and Chromebooks your sport can attain extra gamers than ever. Creating significant experiences on every of those gadgets is vital to making sure your sport stands out.

Throughout this 12 months’s Google I/O, we’re highlighting the most effective practices for rendering, managing belongings, and windowing in resizable contexts to construct high quality experiences and impress your gamers throughout type components.

With the wide range of gadgets and {hardware} configurations, present configurable graphics choices to your gamers. And, for the most effective expertise proper out of the field, outline default graphics choices for various gadgets. Moreover, contemplate commerce offs like storage measurement, efficiency, and compatibility throughout platforms when deciding what texture compression codecs to make use of.

Massive display gadgets help completely different window sizes with configurations like multi-window mode and on orientation change and fold/unfold. By default, Android gives a compatibility mode – however, for probably the most seamless expertise, declare and deal with configuration occasions. Show cutouts, hinges, and even system UI can even occlude your sport window, so help edge-to-edge windowing and guarantee no key sport content material is occluded. When you actually wish to take your sport to the following degree, think about using the Jetpack WindowManager library to help dynamic layouts on foldable gadgets.

To offer smoother gameplay and scale back enter latency think about using body pacing. Additionally contemplate enabling broad colour gamut help in order that vivid colours are rendered correctly whereas additionally maximizing distinction and brightness on massive display HDR shows to enhance realism and immersion to your gamers.

With the altering cellular panorama and transition from OpenGL to Vulkan, deal with swapchain recreation after window configuration adjustments. When you depend on any system particular {hardware} options like host seen system native reminiscence have fallback implementations for different platforms.

Be taught extra in regards to the rendering finest practices and the way to degree up your sport throughout surfaces by tuning into this technical session and make sure to take a look at our multiplatform optimization information.

Get began constructing adaptable apps from telephones to tablets and foldables

You may get began constructing adaptable apps that look nice throughout tablets, foldables, Chromebooks and extra by testing the “Constructing adaptive Android apps” technical session or heading to the massive screens gallery for content material tailor-made to your particular app sort – from productiveness apps to video games… and extra!