Now in Android #114
Google I/O 2025, Android Studio at 10, Android 16 Betas, production-ready generative AI, Imagen in Firebase, kids apps on Wear OS, trusted VPNs in Play, TrustedTime, the latest in AndroidX, and more!
Welcome to Now in Android, your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development.
In this edition, we’ll cover the return of Google I/O, Android Studio Turning 10, the Android 16 Betas, Imagen in Firebase, the latest in AndroidX, and more!
Most of the content of this post is available in the form of a video or podcast, so feel free to watch or listen rather than read on. (Or do all three to help you remember! There won’t be a quiz.)
Get Ready for Google I/O 2025! 🎊
Mark your calendars! Google I/O is returning on May 20–21. This year’s event will share Google’s vision for the future of technology, including updates across Android, AI, web, cloud, and more. Tune in online to learn how the latest AI models can help you build innovative apps and transform your development workflows. Registration is now open.
Celebrating 10 Years of Android Studio 🎂🔟
January 2025 marked the 10th anniversary of Android Studio 1.0 reaching the stable channel. To celebrate this milestone, we reflected on the journey of Android Studio, including the three core principles that guided its development: building a complete product that worked out-of-the-box, leveraging a best-of-breed actively-maintained, open source Java IDE (IntelliJ), and providing a consistent build system with Gradle.
The blog post features reflections from key team members across Android, JetBrains, and Gradle, emphasizing the partnership and community contributions that have been crucial to Android Studio’s success.
To continue the celebration, we’ve launched “Meet the Android Studio Team,” a weekly series of blogs that pulls back the curtain, introducing you to the passionate people behind these tools. So far, we’ve heard from Jamal Eason, Director of Product Management, who shared his journey and insights on the impact of product quality, Gemini integration, and App Quality Insights. Product Manager Paris Hsu recounted her journey to become part of the team, her approach to Compose Tools, and the importance of developer feedback. Trevor Johns, Staff Developer Programs Engineer, discussed the team’s focus on developer productivity through AI and the impact of Kotlin, along with his long history at Google.
Check out the Android Studio’s 10th birthday: our favorite moments video for a look at some of the best moments in Android Studio history from the people that made it happen.
Android 16 Beta Releases are Here! 🤖🎉
The Android team has released betas 1–3 of Android 16, bringing you new features and changes to explore and adapt your apps to. Beta 3 brings platform stability and, with it, the ability to publish apps targeting API 36
Adaptive Apps: Android 16 is phasing out the ability for apps to restrict screen orientation and resizability on large screens. Apps targeting API level 36 on screens wider than 600dp will have resizable windows. Ensure that your UIs scale well across different aspect ratios. This change becomes mandatory for apps targeting API level 37.
Progress centric notifications: A new class of notifications to help users monitor ongoing activities like rideshares and deliveries, featuring a new ProgressStyle template.
Improved Camera and Media quality: Enhanced support for high-quality media, including the Advanced Professional Video (APV) format and camera night mode scene detection. Android 16 also introduces standard Intent actions for capturing motion photos and enhances UltraHDR image quality with HEIC support.
Custom Graphical Effects: New APIs like RuntimeColorFilter and RuntimeXfermode allow you to author and apply complex GPU-accelerated graphical effects using AGSL.
Accessibility Improvements: New APIs for supplemental descriptions, required form fields, support for elements with multiple labels, improved support for expandable elements, indeterminate ProgressBars, and a tri-state CheckBox. Beta 3 adds support for a new outline text high contrast mode.
Behavior Changes: Several behavior changes are introduced in Android 16, including updates to ART internals, predictive back animations, fixed-rate work scheduling optimization, ordered broadcast priority scope, edge-to-edge enforcement, health and fitness permissions, and intent redirect protections. The list of changes not targeted to targetSdk is here, and the ones that are tied to targetSdk are here.
Two Android API Releases in 2025: Expect a major Android release in Q2 and a minor release in Q4. Behavior changes are primarily in the Q2 release. Please test your apps on Android 16.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/03/the-third-beta-of-android-16.html
Production-ready access to Gemini and Imagen cloud models on Android 🖼️💬
Vertex AI in Firebase, which became generally available last October, is a production-ready solution to allow you to leverage the power of generative AI in your apps with. It gives you access to Google’s Gemini Cloud models, such as Gemini 2.0 Flash and Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Imagen 3, Google’s advanced image generation model, is now in public preview in Firebase for Android! The Imagen blog covers how you can use the Firebase SDK for Android to integrate Imagen 3, customize generation (format, safety), and create engaging user experiences with AI-powered visuals.
The production ready blog covers important tips for a successful deployment to production:
- Implement Firebase App Check to help protect backend resources from abuse.
- Consider using Firebase Remote Config for server-controlled configuration of your AI models.
- Gathering user feedback with tools such as Google Analytics is also essential to evaluate the impact of your AI features.
- Remember to be transparent with your users about their engagement with generative AI; make sure to let them know that data sent to Google won’t be used to train Google’s models, and provide them with control over how their activity related to AI model interactions is stored.
Helping users find trusted apps on Google Play 🔐
Google Play is introducing a “Verified” badge for consumer-facing VPN apps that meet specific criteria, including completing the Mobile Application Security Assessment (MASA) Level 2 validation, having an Organization developer account, meeting target API level requirements, having at least 10,000 installs and 250 reviews, being published for at least 90 days, and opting into independent security review and encryption in transit in their Data Safety section.
Building Kids App Experiences for Wear OS 🚸
In collaboration with Samsung, Wear OS is introducing Galaxy Watch for Kids, a new experience enabling kids to stay connected with their families from their smartwatch, no phone necessary. The kids experience includes support for calling, texting, games, and more, with parent-managed contacts and app controls via Google Family Link.
The kids app experience unlocks new opportunities for Wear OS developers to reach younger audiences. Wear OS kids apps must adhere to age / content requirements while supporting standalone functionality — including having ‘standalone’ in their manifest. Watch faces for kids must be built with Watch Face Format. We’re providing new design and content principles to help you build kid-friendly apps for Wear OS. Apps like MathTango are already creating engaging experiences.
TrustedTime for reliable timekeeping ⏰
The new TrustedTime API leverages Google’s secure infrastructure to provide a trustworthy timestamp that is independent of a device’s potentially manipulated local time settings. TrustedTime periodically syncs its clock to Google’s servers and even calculates the device’s clock drift to inform you of potential inaccuracies.
Key benefits include preventing data inconsistency, closing security gaps in time-based measures, ensuring reliable scheduling, and providing more accurate time compared to the device’s internal clock. Use cases span across financial applications, gaming (preventing clock manipulation), limited-time offers, e-commerce, content licensing, IoT devices, and productivity apps, The TrustedTime API is built on Google Play services and is available on devices running Android 5 (Lollipop) and above.
AndroidX Releases 🚀
The first alpha of the Android test libraries now require a minSdkVersion of 21:
Core 1.7, Espresso 3.7, Espresso device 1.1 , Junit 1.3, Truth 1.7, Monitor 1.8, Runner 1.7, and Rules 1.7. There are a few other changes, such as Espresso device 1.1 updating WidthSizeClass and HeightSizeClass to use androidx.window size classes.
Wear Ongoing & Interactions Version 1.1 is released, bringing a crucial bug fix that prevents a runtime exception for Apps running on Wear OS 5 (API level 34) or higher and targeting API level 35 or higher.
Browser 1.9 alpha 1 is released, including color scheme params support, experimental ephemeral browsing for Custom Tabs, a new service intent filter category to support multi-network, and more.
TV material 1.1 includes changes to the way focus is handled along with fixes for broken focus management in Carousel, fixes to jittery text while scaling, and more.
Now then… 👋
That’s it for this edition, with Google I/O announced for May 20–21, the 10th anniversary of Android Studio, the Android 16 Betas, production-ready generative AI along with Imagen in Firebase, kids apps on Wear OS, trusted VPNs in Play, TrustedTime, the latest in AndroidX, and more!
Check back soon for your next update from the Android developer universe!