Posted by Matthew McCullough – Vice President, Product Management, Android Developer
We just dropped our Fall episode of #TheAndroidShow, on YouTube and on developer.android.com, and this time are live from Droidcon in London, giving you the latest in Android Developer news including the biggest update to Gemini in Android Studio as well as sharing that there will be more frequent SDK releases for Android, including two next year. Let’s dive in!
AI has the ability to accelerate your development experience, and help you be more productive. That’s why we introduced Gemini in Android Studio, your AI-powered development companion, designed to make it easier and faster for you to build high quality Android apps, faster. Today, we’re launching the biggest set of updates to Gemini in Android Studio since launch: now for the first time, Gemini brings the power of AI with features at every stage of the development lifecycle, directly into your Android Studio IDE experience.
Android has always worked to get innovation in the hands of users faster. In addition to our annual platform releases, we’ve invested in Project Treble, Mainline, Google Play services, monthly security updates, and the quarterly releases that help power Pixel’s popular feature drop updates. Building off the success those quarterly Pixel releases have had towards bringing innovation faster to Pixel users, Android will have more frequent SDK releases going forward, with two releases planned in 2025 with new developer APIs. These releases will help to drive faster innovation in apps and devices, with higher stability and polish for users and developers. Stay informed on upcoming releases for the 2025 calendar.
Your users, especially in the premium segment, don’t just buy a phone anymore, they buy into a whole ecosystem of devices. So the experiences you build should follow your users seamlessly across the many screens they own. Take large screens, for instance – foldables, tablets, ChromeOS Devices: there are now over 300 million active Android large-screen devices. This summer, Samsung released their new foldables – the Galaxy Z Fold6 and Z Flip6, and at Google we released our own – the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. We’re also investing in a number of platform features to improve how users interact with these devices, like the developer preview of Desktop Windowing that we’ve been working on in collaboration with Samsung – optimizing these large screen devices for productivity. High quality apps optimized for large screens have several advantages on Play as well: like improved visibility in the Play Store and eligibility for featuring in curated collections and editorial articles. Apps now get separate ratings and reviews for different form factors, making positive feedback more visible.
And it’s paying off for those that make the investment: we’ve seen that using a tablet, flip, or fold increases app spend by ~20%. Flipaclip is proof of this: they’ve seen a 54% growth in tablet users in the past four months. It has never been easier to build for large screens – with Compose APIs and Android Studio support specifically for building adaptive UIs.
Many of you build apps for multiple platforms, requiring you to write platform-specific code or make compromises in order to reuse code across platforms. We’ve seen the most value in reducing duplicated code for business logic. So earlier this year, we announced official support for Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) for shared business logic across Android and iOS. KMP, developed by JetBrains, reduces development time and duplicated code, while retaining the flexibility and benefits of native programming.
At Google, we’ve been migrating Workspace apps, starting with the Google Docs app, to use KMP for shared business logic across Android, iOS and Web. In the community there are a growing number of companies using KMP and getting significant benefits. And it’s not just apps – we’ve seen a 30% increase in the number of KMP libraries developed this year.
To make it easier for you to leverage KMP in your apps, we’ve been working on migrating many of our Jetpack libraries to take advantage of KMP. For example, Lifecycle, ViewModel, and Paging are KMP compatible libraries. Meanwhile, libraries like Room, DataStore, and Collections have KMP support, so they work out-of-the-box on Android and iOS. We’ve also added a new template to Android Studio so you can add a shared KMP module to your existing Android app and begin sharing business logic across platforms. Kickstart your Kotlin Multiplatform journey with this comprehensive guide.
That’s a wrap on this quarter’s episode of #TheAndroidShow. A special thanks to our co-hosts for the Fall episode, Simona Milanović and Alejandra Stamato! You can watch the full show on YouTube and on developer.android.com/events/show.
Have an idea for our next episode of #TheAndroidShow? It’s your conversation with the broader community, and we’d love to hear your ideas for our next quarterly episode – you can let us know on X or LinkedIn.
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