Android Dev Summit recap

Hello Android developers,

Google is running a number of Android Dev Summit events around the world in 2022, with all sessions available to view online. Here are some of the highlights for foldable and large-screen developers:

Android Dev Summit – Modern Android Development

The first event, focused on Modern Android Development, was hosted in Silicon Valley on October 24^th, 2022. All sessions can be viewed from this YouTube playlist:

Android Dev Summit – Form Factors

The second event, focused on Form Factors, was hosted in London on November 9^th, 2022. All sessions can be viewed from this YouTube playlist:

As you can imagine, being this second event focused on form factors there were many great interesting talks covering large-screen and foldable devices, below we are highlighting some of our favorites:

• Do’s and don’ts: Mindset for optimizing apps for large screens

  You will learn best practices for building Android apps that work well on large screens and foldables.

• Designing for larger screens: Canonical layouts and visual hierarchy

  You will learn about canonical layouts and core development concepts, such as large screen and foldable design patterns and libraries that will help you to implement them, etc.

• Build better UIs across form factors with Android Studio

  You will learn about new tools and improved features on Android Studio that will help you to accelerate your workflow when building apps for large screens and foldable devices.

• Drag & drop for seamless multitasking

  In this short talk you will learn how to quickly add support for dragging and dropping content from/into your app, that’s extremely useful when your app runs on a large screen or foldable device.

• Compose: Implementing responsive UI for large screens and foldables

  If you are already using Jetpack Compose don’t miss this talk where you will learn how to build adaptive layouts for every screen size.

• Your camera app on different from factors

  There are some considerations that you should take into account when developing apps that use the camera targeting new form factor devices.

• Do more with multi-window and Activity embedding

  Starting with Android 12L multi-tasking is easier than ever, but this comes with new scenarios we have to face, for example, interacting with two Activities in multi-window mode. In this talk you will learn what you need to do to make sure your app works well in that scenario and how to show two activities side-by-side from your own app.

There were a few other talks that also covered large screen and foldable devices, so don’t miss the whole playlist.

Android Dev Summit – Platform

The third event, focused on Android Platform, was aired on November 14^th, 2022. All sessions can be viewed from this YouTube playlist. You can learn very interesting topics such as app widgets, storage, graphics or privacy.

To coincide with the event, a number of large screen and foldable documentation and guidance was updated, including the gallery page, Material Design canonical layouts, and Jetpack Compose adaptive layouts guidance. These are all great references for large screen and foldable app developers, and are a great complement to the Surface Duo Design Kit, the documentation, and our large-screen design patterns blog post last week.

Feedback and resources

There are more events to come – bookmark the Android Dev Summit site for links and more information.

If you have questions about foldable Android app development or want to share your work, please reach out to us on Tech Community or find us on Twitter @surfaceduodev.

You can also live chat with us on Twitch this Friday at 13h CET and re-played later at 11am PST!