Android Fireside Chat - Q&A with the Android Platform Team

Overview

Engage in a 40-minute fireside chat with the Android platform team at Google I/O '17, featuring engineers from various Android teams. Explore topics like choosing between Kotlin and Java for beginners, privacy concerns with new features, Project Treble's impact on OEM implementations, and developers' pain points. Delve into discussions about Android O changes, broadcast receiver blocking, Kotlin support for Gradle scripts, and integrating Java frameworks in Kotlin projects. Learn about app profiling tools like Systrace and CPU monitoring, their differences, and use cases. Gain insights directly from Android experts in this open Q&A session, covering a wide range of technical and strategic topics relevant to Android development.

Syllabus

- For people that are starting with Android, do you recommend them to use Kotlin or Java?
- We've heard a lot at I/O about features like the new Assistant and similar that require turning on location history and search history and a lot of other data collections, what are the options or alternatives for people that want those capabilities that want to maintain their privacy and not report a ton of history?
- Could you tell what you're doing at a high level [with Treble] to ensure that the implementation from some of the OEM partners don't break, either intentionally or not, some of the things you're going to do in bringing forth new versions of the OS?
- When you use your Android phone, what do you really hate and why haven't you fixed it yet?
- Knowing what you know now, and especially with some of the changes in Android O, would you still implement the same four application interfaces, such as Activities, Service, and Intents, in a new operating system?
- My question is to do with the blocking of broadcast receivers declared in manifests in O. In a session this afternoon, Dan said that user choice is the essence of Android, so why won't you let users whitelist apps?
- Like everyone else, I'm really excited to have the support and encouragement for application development in Kotlin. I'm wondering if that same encouragement will extend to Gradle Script Kotlin when it's released, probably later in the year.
- For third party frameworks, are you going to need to add anything like a bridging header, as you do in Swift to Objective-C to support Java projects in Kotlin projects and the other way around? Are we going to need to add any bridging in an Android project to use a Java third-party framework?
- So Tim [Murray] showed us how to use Systrace to profile our apps and in Tor's session today we saw CPU monitoring. I'd like to know how these compare and contrast, and what are the values of each?