Hello Android developers!

The Surface Duo Developer Experience team presented at our first in-person events this year, at droidcon in Berlin and London.

droidcon Berlin

We presented our brand-new Surface Duo 2 in Berlin. People loved the device and the possibilities that it offers.

We delivered a talk and a workshop. The talk was focused on showing attendees what foldable devices are, the distinct types (single screen foldables and dual-screen foldables) and the postures these devices can have. The second part of the talk, covered the different components that developers currently have and that can help to create new fantastic foldable and dual-screen experiences. Components such as Jetpack Window Manager and Jetpack SlidingPaneLayout were shown there with demos, code, etc.
We announced an update to our Surface Duo Kotlin components: foldable awareness for multiple devices. From now on, components such the FoldableLayout, FoldableFrameLayout, BottomNavigation and RecyclerView are foldable aware through the usage of Jetpack Window Manager and work on any foldable device that supports Google’s Jetpack component.

During the last day of the conference, we ran a workshop where we live-coded how to take an app that was designed with a single screen UI on mind, and make it shine on foldable and dual-screen devices. The workshop showed the usage of SlidingPaneLayout and NavigationRail, as well how to use the new Jetpack Window Manager’s testing artifact to implement UI tests.

The code that we used in the workshop is available on GitHub, feel free to have a look and learn what attendees did there.

droidcon London

For the London edition of droidcon we focused on Flutter development, showcasing how foldable layouts work in Flutter. We discussed the larger context of responsive and adaptive design and proposed several design patterns for enhancing existing applications. The talk was a collaboration with the Flutter team at Google and Andrew Fitz Gibbon shared the stage virtually with us.

Participating in the Flutter Panel allowed us to share our thoughts, along with other key members of the Flutter community. We answered a few questions from the audience.

droidcon Online Webinar – PWAs can do anything

In September we presented a session on dual-screen web and publishing PWAs that take advantage of these APIs on Surface Duo.

Visit the droidcon archive to watch on demand.

Feedback and resources

We also participated in droidcon last year, you can still watch the 2020 content online too.

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.