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Android API level updates are becoming more frequent and streamlined. In 2025, there will be a major API release in Q2 and a minor API release in Q4, with the goal of delivering you more polished and innovative APIs faster. The minor release in Q4 will include new APIs, but, like the incremental quarterly releases we have today, will have no planned behavior changes, minimizing the need for compatibility testing against that version.
We’ve also moved the major release forward one quarter to Q2 of 2025 to better align with the schedules of major Android OEMs, ensuring that more devices receive the latest updates sooner than before. You should adjust annual compatibility testing schedules accordingly to prepare for this change. We’ll soon begin the developer preview and beta program for the Q2 2025 major release so you can begin testing, including changes we’ve made to the SDK to support minor API levels.
Android Studio’s Gemini AI assistant can now write, refactor, and document code, as well as generate unit test scenarios, analyze build errors, and provide insights for crash reports. It has been integrated into Compose workflows, simplifying the visualization of composables during design time.
These features are available in the Android Studio canary channel and will be released in the upcoming Ladybug Feature Drop, along with other enhancements.
Google Play shared new ways to grow your audience, optimize revenue, and protect your business.
To help with discovery, Google Play added full-screen portrait videos on Play Store listings, personalized query recommendations, and a user selection around interests for app and game recommendations.
To help with commerce, Google Play is proactively encouraging payment setup, expanding payment options, providing algorithmic recommendations for in-app purchases, sending cart abandonment reminders, and increasing the adoption of biometric verification for faster and more secure checkouts.
To help with security, the Play Integrity API will soon support hardware-backed security signals for improved API verdicts on supported Android 13+ devices, along with a New app access risk feature that detects and responds to apps that can capture the screen or control the device.
The Adaptive spotlight week covered new documentation for building adaptive apps, the Material 3 adaptive library, the Developer Preview of Desktop windowing on Android Tablets, Custom Adaptive layouts in Compose, the new productivity app developer center, responsive layouts in the JetLagged sample, the new Ink API, and finished with an Adaptive #AskAndroid segment. With Android powering foldables, tablets, ChromeOS, and cars, it’s time to consider building adaptive.
The future of Android is rooted in AI and machine learning, and the Android AI Spotlight Week shared a wealth of resources around the latest in AI and its potential for Android app development.
The week began with A quick introduction to large language models for Android Developers, discussed Studio’s new Gemini-powered code completion, announced experimental developer access to the latest version of Gemini Nano, gave an Introduction to Privacy and Safety for Gemini Nano, and walked through Android’s on-device GenAI solutions.
The week continued with bringing your own AI model to Android devices, and PyTorch Machine Learning Models on Android. It went into utilizing cloud models to add Gemini capabilities to your Android app, including a showcase of the Gemini API in Action, and an interview with a developer of the Life journaling app that utilized Gemini through Vertex AI in Firebase to help users log entries.
The week finished with a discussion about Building with AI on Android and beyond.
Donovan covers how CameraX, Android’s Jetpack camera library will now handle the composition of dual concurrent camera streams starting with version 1.5.0-alpha01, making the feature easier to support. To tell CameraX to handle the composition, you use the new SingleCameraConfig constructor which has a new parameter for a CompositionSettings object.
Eiji wrote about how Chrome 131 and later support third-party autofill services (like password managers) without the existing compatibility mode to autofill forms on websites. Developers of these services need to tell their users to toggle a setting in Chrome to continue using their service with Chrome.
Christiaan announced an upcoming change to the attestation format for the Android FIDO2 API, effective as of November 2024, with a mandatory switch to the new hardware-backed format in early April 2025 due to the deprecation of the SafetyNet API upon which the current attestation is based.
Part of the Adaptive Spotlight week, Rebecca wrote about how we used logic coupled with Window Size Classes, Flow layouts, movableContentOf and LookaheadScope,to create a responsive dashboard-like layout in Jetpack Compose in the JetLagged sample with this pull request.
Inspiring developer stories 📰
- Miguel covered how FlipaClip optimizing for large screens including stylus support and redesigning the large screen drawing area gave them a 54% increase in tablet users over just four months.
- In the latest #WeArePlay, Robbie covers the developer behind NomadHer and the way she’s aiming to reshape how women explore the world by building a global community: sharing travel tips, prioritizing safety, and connecting with one another to explore new destinations.
- Kseniia covered how AllTrails created a new Wear OS application that led to over 1 million downloads, including their use of Compose for WearOS and Health Connect.
In episode 210 of Android Developers Backstage Chet, Romain and Tor chat with Sebastiano about how the Android Studio team builds UIs, covering how Compose for Desktop is used in parts of Android Studio and how the Compose Markdown renderer available in the Jewel library makes Studio Bot tick.
Listen to it in podcast or youtube format.
#TheAndroidShow included a live Q&A from Droidcon London, a big update to Gemini in Android Studio, coverage of the updated 2025 Android release schedule including some of the internal tech that makes it possible, and more!
Google Play released the October PolicyBytes, where Paul covered policy updates around health and medical apps, health misinformation, medical device access, Health Connect by Android permissions, the enforcement process, user data protection, and other key updates.
Elif covered recent Room renovations, including Room’s support for Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP), allowing you to share database code across Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux. The talk covers getting started with Room KMP, and the basics of defining entities and queries.
Simona explores lazy grids, which provide a flexible alternative to using columns, especially for grids with multiple columns on larger screens.
Jossi dives into AnchoredDraggable and how it enables swiping or dragging a component between anchor points.
We also covered how Spotify drives discovery & engagement on and beyond the Play Store.
Elif covered setting up your environment for Room and KMP in the Room renovations #short.
Simona’s lazy grids #short creates a landscape layout for portrait content by using lazy grids to expand the UI to multiple columns.
Our enable edge to edge short is a very quick reminder to call enableEdgeToEdge to get ready to target Android 15.
The advanced activity embedding codelab covers a few newly-released features for activity embedding, including pane expansion, activity pinning, and full screen dialog dimming.
The add Gemini capabilities to your Android app codelab guides you through the process of adding summarization capabilities to the JetNews sample application using Vertex AI in Firebase and the Gemini API.
The first alpha of material 3 1.4 includes behavior changes, including Material 3 components using the new MotionScheme to define their motion, updated colors, and more. New features include wavy progress indicators, support for emphasized type scales, SplitButton shape morphs, and lots, lots, more.
The first alpha of navigation 2.9 supports custom navigators marking their destinations as implementing the SupportingPane interface, indicating to the NavController that these destinations will be shown alongside other destinations.
We released the first alpha of Ink, a modular and configurable library to make it easy to create, render, and manipulate beautiful ink strokes authored in your application.
ConstraintLayout moved to 2.2 and core moved to 1.1, fixing some interactions with SharedTransitionLayout and layout issues due to recomposition.
We released the first alpha of credentials-registry, allowing providers to pre-register credential metadata with Credential Manager which can be later surfaced to the user by the Credential Manager upon an incoming app request.
The first alpha of games 4.0 was released, with many fixes and support for left-right keys in GameTextInput.
The first alpha of wear-protolayout and wear-tiles were also released, with support for Roboto Flex, DynamicFormatter, and more.
That’s it for this week, with Android API level and schedule updates, more AI assistance from Gemini in Android Studio, Google Play updates to help with discovery, commerce, and security, spotlight weeks on Adaptive Android Apps and Android AI, simplified support for dual concurrent cameras in CameraX, responsive layout, lazy grids, and AnchoredDraggable in Jetpack Compose, KMP in Room, Material 3 1.4, Navigation 2.9, and Ink 1.0 in Android Jetpack,and more.
Check back soon for your next update from the Android developer universe! 💫