برچسب: Introducing

Android Developers Blog: Updates to the Android XR SDK: Introducing Developer Preview 2

Posted by Matthew McCullough – VP of Product Management, Android Developer

Since launching the Android XR SDK Developer Preview alongside Samsung, Qualcomm, and Unity last year, we’ve been blown away by all of the excitement we’ve been hearing from the broader Android community. Whether it’s through coding live-streams or local Google Developer Group talks, it’s been an outstanding experience participating in the community to build the future of XR together, and we’re just getting started.

Today we’re excited to share an update to the Android XR SDK: Developer Preview 2, packed with new features and improvements to help you develop helpful and delightful immersive experiences with familiar Android APIs, tools and open standards created for XR.

At Google I/O, we have two technical sessions related to Android XR. The first is Building differentiated apps for Android XR with 3D content, which covers many features present in Jetpack SceneCore and ARCore for Jetpack XR. The future is now, with Compose and AI on Android XR covers creating XR-differentiated UI and our vision on the intersection of XR with cutting-edge AI capabilities.

Building differentiated apps for Android XR with 3D content and The future is now, with Compose and AI on Android XR

What’s new in Developer Preview 2

Since the release of Developer Preview 1, we’ve been focused on making the APIs easier to use and adding new immersive Android XR features. Your feedback has helped us shape the development of the tools, SDKs, and the platform itself.

With the Jetpack XR SDK, you can now play back 180° and 360° videos, which can be stereoscopic by encoding with the MV-HEVC specification or by encoding view-frames adjacently. The MV-HEVC standard is optimized and designed for stereoscopic video, allowing your app to efficiently play back immersive videos at great quality. Apps built with Jetpack Compose for XR can use the SpatialExternalSurface composable to render media, including stereoscopic videos.

Using Jetpack Compose for XR, you can now also define layouts that adapt to different XR display configurations. For example, use a SubspaceModifier to specify the size of a Subspace as a percentage of the device’s recommended viewing size, so a panel effortlessly fills the space it’s positioned in.

Material Design for XR now supports more component overrides for TopAppBar, AlertDialog, and ListDetailPaneScaffold, helping your large-screen enabled apps that use Material Design effortlessly adapt to the new world of XR.

An app adapts to XR using Material Design for XR with the new component overrides

In ARCore for Jetpack XR, you can now track hands after requesting the appropriate permissions. Hands are a collection of 26 posed hand joints that can be used to detect hand gestures and bring a whole new level of interaction to your Android XR apps:

Hands bring a natural input method to your Android XR experience.

For more guidance on developing apps for Android XR, check out our Android XR Fundamentals codelab, the updates to our Hello Android XR sample project, and a new version of JetStream with Android XR support.

The Android XR Emulator has also received updates to stability, support for AMD GPUs, and is now fully integrated within the Android Studio UI.

The Android XR Emulator is now integrated in Android Studio

Developers using Unity have already successfully created and ported existing games and apps to Android XR. Today, you can upgrade to the Pre-Release version 2 of the Unity OpenXR: Android XR package! This update adds many performance improvements such as support for Dynamic Refresh Rate, which optimizes your app’s performance and power consumption. Shaders made with Shader Graph now support SpaceWarp, making it easier to use SpaceWarp to reduce compute load on the device. Hand meshes are now exposed with occlusion, which enables realistic hand visualization.

Check out Unity’s improved Mixed Reality template for Android XR, which now includes support for occlusion and persistent anchors.

We recently launched Android XR Samples for Unity, which demonstrate capabilities on the Android XR platform such as hand tracking, plane tracking, face tracking, and passthrough.

Google’s open-source Unity samples demonstrate platform features and show how they’re implemented

The Firebase AI Logic for Unity is now in public preview! This makes it easy for you to integrate gen AI into your apps, enabling the creation of AI-powered experiences with Gemini and Android XR. The Firebase AI Logic fully supports Gemini’s capabilities, including multimodal input and output, and bi-directional streaming for immersive conversational interfaces. Built with production readiness in mind, Firebase AI Logic is integrated with core Firebase services like App Check, Remote Config, and Cloud Storage for enhanced security, configurability, and data management. Learn more about this on the Firebase blog or go straight to the Gemini API using Vertex AI in Firebase SDK documentation to get started.

Continuing to build the future together

Our commitment to open standards continues with the glTF Interactivity specification, in collaboration with the Khronos Group. which will be supported in glTF models rendered by Jetpack XR later this year. Models using the glTF Interactivity specification are self-contained interactive assets that can have many pre-programmed behaviors, like rotating objects on a button press or changing the color of a material over time.

Android XR will be available first on Samsung’s Project Moohan, launching later this year. Soon after, our partners at XREAL will release the next Android XR device. Codenamed Project Aura, it’s a portable and tethered device that gives users access to their favorite Android apps, including those that have been built for XR. It will launch as a developer edition, specifically for you to begin creating and experimenting. The best news? With the familiar tools you use to build Android apps today, you can build for these devices too.

XREAL’s Project Aura

The Google Play Store is also getting ready for Android XR. It will list supported 2D Android apps on the Android XR Play Store when it launches later this year. If you are working on an Android XR differentiated app, you can get it ready for the big launch and be one of the first differentiated apps on the Android XR Play Store:

And we know many of you are excited for the future of Android XR on glasses. We are shaping the developer experience now and will share more details on how you can participate later this year.

To get started creating and developing for Android XR, check out developer.android.com/develop/xr where you will find all of the tools, libraries, and resources you need to work with the Android XR SDK. In particular, try out our samples and codelabs.

We welcome your feedback, suggestions, and ideas as you’re helping shape Android XR. Your passion, expertise, and bold ideas are vital as we continue to develop Android XR together. We look forward to seeing your XR-differentiated apps when Android XR devices launch later this year!

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2025 updates on io.google starting May 22.

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21/05/2025
Android Developers Blog: Introducing Widget Quality Tiers

Posted by Ivy Knight – Senior Design Advocate

Level up your app Widgets with new quality tiers

Widgets can be a powerful tool for engaging users and increasing the visibility of your app. They can also help you to improve the user experience by providing users with a more convenient way to access your app’s content and features.

To build a great Android widget, it should be helpful, adaptive, and visually cohesive with the overall aesthetic of the device home screen.

In order to help you achieve a great widget, we are pleased to introduce Android Widget Quality Tiers!

The new Widget quality tiers are here to help guide you towards a best practice implementation of widgets, that will look great and bring your user’s value across the ecosystem of Android Phone, Tablets and Foldables.

What does this mean for widget makers?

Whether you are planning a new widget, or investing in an update to an existing widget, the Widget Quality Tiers will help you evaluate and plan for a high quality widget.

Just like Large Screen quality tiers help optimize app experiences, these Widget tiers guide you in creating great widgets across all Android devices. Now, similar tiers are being introduced for widgets to ensure they’re not just functional, but also visually appealing and user-friendly.

Widgets that meet quality tier guidelines will be discoverable under the new Widget filter in Google Play.

Consider using our Canonical Widget layouts, which are based on Jetpack Glance components, to make it easier for you to design and build a Tier 1 widget your users will love.

Let’s take a look at the Widget Quality Tiers

There are three tiers built with required system defaults and suggested guidance to create an enhanced widget experience:

Tier 1: Differentiated

Differentiated widgets go further by implementing theming and adapting to resizing.

Tier 1 widgets are exemplary widgets offering hero experiences that are personalized, and create unique and productive homescreens. These widgets meet Tier 2 standards plus enhancements for layout, color, discovery, and system coherence criteria.

For example, use the system provided corner radius, and don’t set a custom corner radius on Widgets.

Add more personalization with dynamic color and generated previews while ensuring your widgets look good across devices by not overriding system defaults.

Tier 1 widgets that, from the top left, properly crop content, fill the layout bounds, have appropriately sized headers and touch targets, and make good use of colors and contrast.

Tier 2: Quality Standard

These widgets are helpful, usable, and provide a quality experience. They meet all criteria for layout, color, discovery, and content.

Make sure your widget has appropriate touch targets.

Tier 2 widgets are functional but simple, they meet the basic criteria for a usable app. But if you want to create a truly stellar experience for your users, tier 1 criteria introduce ways to make a more personal, interactive, and coherent widget.

Tier 3: Low Quality

These widgets don’t meet the minimum quality bar and don’t provide a great user experience, meaning they are not following or missing criteria from Tier 2.

Clockwise from the top left not filling the bounds, poorly cropped content, low color contrast, mis-sized header, and small touch targets.

For example, ensure content is visible and not cropped

Build and elevate your Android widgets with Widget Quality Tiers

Dive deeper into the widget quality tiers and start building widgets that not only look great but also provide an amazing user experience! Check out the official Android documentation for detailed information and best practices.

This blog post is part of our series: Spotlight Week on Widgets, where we provide resources—blog posts, videos, sample code, and more—all designed to help you design and create widgets. You can read more in the overview of Spotlight Week: Widgets, which will be updated throughout the week.

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02/05/2025