Droidcons, Dev Summits, and Android 12s. Oh my!

This week, StoicallyTyped is being curated by a guest author! I’m Adam McNeilly, a Google Developer Expert for Android, and I’m really excited to share with you a ton of great stuff from the past week.

Let’s start with some fun stuff, before we dive into all the new announcements.

This week, we discovered a new method from the standard library that includes six words. firstNotNullOfOrNull is quite a mouthful, but once you break it down it’s incredibly clear what it does, and is a good thing to have in our toolkit just in case. You can find the documentation and samples here.

To celebrate Android Dev Summit, covered below, Google created a tool to create our own Jetpack Superhero. You can customize their appearance, and all of their power meters accordingly. Share yours with us on Twitter!

This week, Google hosted Android Dev Summit. An annual conference full of new announcements and presentations about Android. Check out the Keynote presentation here:

There were a ton of goodies announced this week, which you can find in detail on the Android Dev Summit website, but let’s go over some key announcements.

The first bullet point from above deserves its own section. Material You is an incredibly new design concept making its first appearance in Android 12. This is a way to provide dynamic theming throughout the user’s phone experience, all based on their background photo. This means we take colors and tones that are important to the user, and provide that personalized experience throughout the phone. In a recent live stream, I showed how we can start adding Material You (also known as Material 3) into our applications. A video for this will be available soon on my YouTube channel.

Check out a few examples of our TOA application with the corresponding background on our phone.

Speaking of that live stream, we forgot another major update from this week…

This week, those of us fortunate to place an order starting seeing our Pixel 6 devices delivered to our doorstep. Mine arrived on Thursday the 28th. My first impressions are very high - I love the look and feel of the phone. The screen is great, and the camera has really impressed me. I do miss the back of the phone finger print scanner, but the on-display version was quick to get used to. What are your thoughts on the phone? Let us know on Twitter!

As exciting as Android Dev Summit has been, that’s not even the only major event from this week. We had a long anticipated return to in person conferences with Droidcon Berlin and Droidcon London. Their agendas were packed with presentations - check out their websites to learn more.

How can we support a feature that is only available after a specific Android version, without increasing our minimum SDK?

Did I miss something great this week? Have a question you want answered by the community? Send them to me on Twitter, reply to this email or join the discussion on Telegram. I’d love to hear from you and chat!

If you enjoyed this issue send it to someone you think might enjoy it.

Remember to stay hydrated and have a great week!

Thanks for reading!

- Matt and Adam ✌️