Hello Android developers!

This week’s blog includes lots of news from Google’s Android Dev Summit – especially for dual-screen, foldable, and large screen app developers. The Surface Duo Developer Experience team is here to help developers plan and adapt their Android apps for new form factors like Microsoft Surface Duo 2. Here are some highlights from the summit and where to get more information to put the ideas into practice!

Dual-screen and foldable apps

The Android team ran a session focused on building or adapting apps for large screen and foldable devices, building on their large screen developer content with new docs on folding features and testing.

We have a variety of sample apps to help developers learn how to express the different user experience patterns that are enabled by foldable devices, including using Jetpack Window Manager to directly manipulate views or implement higher-level controls like SlidingPaneLayout.

Figure 1: SlidingPaneLayout on a tablet and Surface Duo 2

For developers looking for an additional foundation to build on, we have a library of dual-screen layouts that can kick-start your dual-screen app development, all based on Jetpack Window Manager. Beta03 of Jetpack Window Manager was also released.

Jetpack Compose

Android Dev Summit featured eight sessions covering Jetpack Compose. We also have Compose documentation and samples to help bring apps to foldables and dual-screen devices. You can use Jetpack Window Manager directly with Compose, or add our Compose TwoPaneLayout to your project.

Figure 2: Jetpack Compose list-detail sample

Material Design 3

Google released some foldable device guidance as part of Material Design 3. This new documentation, in conjunction with the Surface Duo Design Kit 2.1, will help designers and developers build and adapt user experiences for dual-screen and foldable devices. There is also updated documentation about window size classes to help build responsive layouts that work across the full range of screen sizes.

Figure 3: Surface Duo Design Kit 2.1

Android emulator updates

We’ve blogged previously about the enhancements our team has made to the Android emulator – pen pressure and sensitivity and multi-touch support – but it was still exciting to see them highlighted at Android Dev Summit.

Improving the Android emulator helps the entire developer community, including those working on Surface Duo-related enhancements, and we look forward to contributing more in the future. To take advantage of these emulator testing capabilities, we have our Pen and Ink SDK for Kotlin and Java, the open-source Sketch 360 app for Xamarin/C# developers, and the Surface Duo 2 emulator even ships with the Webboard PWA demo which is a web-based pen example (and is also open-source).

Resources and feedback

For coding tips, visit the Surface Duo developer documentation , our samples, and Google’s Android large screen development guidance.

If you have any questions, or would like to tell us about your dual-screen apps, use the feedback forum or message us on Twitter @surfaceduodev. 

Finally, please join us for our dual-screen developer livestream at 11am (Pacific time) each Friday – mark it in your calendar and check out the archives on YouTube.