Surface Duo Blog
Build great Android experiences, from AI to foldable and large-screens.
Latest posts
Drag and drop with AndroidX
Hello Android developers, Foldable and large-screen devices are great for multi-tasking – you can position two apps side-by-side to compare data or just do two things at once! The other benefit of side-by-side apps is the ability to drag and drop content between them, whether the apps are across screens on a dual-screen device, or next to each other in multi-window mode on a tablet device. The Surface Duo drag and drop sample has been updated to use the AndroidX drag and drop package to show how to add this feature to your apps. This package provides helper methods to simplify drag and drop implem...
Compose TwoPaneLayout updates
Hello Compose developers, This week, we’d like to announce two major updates to our TwoPaneLayout component that come with version . We hope these updates will help make the library even more flexible and useful for you all. We also have some other Compose SDK updates to announce! New value in PaneMode enum It may seem counterintuitive, but we actually decided to add a value to the TwoPaneMode enum. As a reminder, the pane mode in TwoPaneLayout helps you choose when you want to show one or two panes. We realized that, in some cases, people may want to change the pane mode dynamically,...
droidcon New York and London
Hello Android developers! It has been great to see the community face-to-face at droidcon events around the world in 2022. The Surface Duo team really enjoyed meeting folks, presenting, and discussing foldable app development face-to-face. If you didn’t make it to an event (or if you did but want to re-live it) more sessions are now available to view for free online.droidcon London 2022 droidcon London videos available Talks from droidcon London are available now to watch online, including John Wiese finding success on dual-screen, foldable, and large screens with a hint of Flutter: ...
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 24th, 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 9th, 2022. All sessions can be viewed ...
Large-screen design patterns
Hello app designers, At the first Android Dev Summit of 2022 Google announced updated large screen design guidance, gallery, and tips for foldables. These updates included a list of canonical layouts which are complementary to the dual-screen design patterns featured in the Surface Duo developer documentation. Material Design has also been updated, so there is a lot of support for designers looking to create new experiences that go beyond a small phone screen. This post helps designers and developers looking to build for both foldable and large-screen devices to combine both sources of guidanc...
.NET MAUI for Android and cross-platform apps
Hello .NET developers, .NET Conf is happening this week and one of the big announcements is the release of .NET 7 which includes an updated release of .NET MAUI for .NET 7. The latest .NET MAUI release includes dual-screen Android support based on Jetpack Window Manager, so you can build cross-platform apps for mobile and desktop that also adapt to foldable Android devices. .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) .NET MAUI lets you build apps for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Tizen on all types of devices from mobile phones to tablets and desktop form factors. Apps are built with C# and XAML using ...
Activity Embedding preview for large screens and foldables
Hello Android developers, The Jetpack Window Manager (JWM) library helps you build adaptive UIs that work well on any device form factor (i.e. single screen, dual screen, foldable, and large screen devices). Jetpack Window Manager provides you with the information that you need to adapt your app’s UI, so it works well on any device. For example, you can know where a folding feature is located, the posture that the device is using according to the folding feature and its orientation, etc. Activity Embedding Activity Embedding is part of Jetpack Window Manager version 1.1 alpha and contains APIs that h...
Android 12L for developers on Surface Duo
Hello Android developers! We're excited to see that Android 12L is being rolled out to Surface Duo devices, and equally keen to see what the Android developer community builds to support it. Android 12L for foldable app developers The good news for developers is that dual-screen APIs have not changed and foldable app enhancements written for earlier versions of Android will continue to work. Here are just a few of the ways that developers build foldable and large-screen aware apps for Android 12L: Dual-screen libraries Take advantage of our developer and designer resources at learn.micros...
Persisting and sharing ink
Hello Android developers! We have some updates to the InkSDK that we would like to share with you, as well as some general guidance on persisting ink and open ink standards. Overview While Android provides different canvases for rendering ink, there is little guidance on how to store that ink or what format it should be in when communicating with other apps. Let’s dive into some topics surrounding this concept. Persisting Ink Rendering ink on a canvas is important, but how that data is pulled off the canvas and saved is equally as important. In the previous InkSDK ve...