Android Jetpack Weekly #11

Experimental annotation, Biometric & Webkit are stable

2 min readNov 9, 2019

Hi! A new week and new updates! Let’s go to find out what’s new in Jetpack on this week:

New Stable Libraries

Annotation-Experimental 1.0.0

The first stable release of the new library that helps make youк code better. Do you know about Kotlin’s @Experimenal annotation? The purpose of it is to mark not the final API and aware of you use such kinds of APIs. But warnings work only in Kotlin code.

Annotation-Experimental library contains special annotation @Experimental (from AndroidX) that can be analyzed by Android Lint and allow us to have the same warnings in Java code.

Biometric 1.0.0

AndroidX Biometric library is a backport of android.hardware.biometrics from Android 10. The library unify work with biometric scanner across all version of Android (from Android 6.0)

Additional features of the library:

Built-in lifecycle management for BiometricPrompt within a Fragment or FragmentActivity
Special handling for devices known to incorrectly present weak biometrics during crypto-based authentication

Webkit 1.1.0 (compare to 1.0.0)

Getter APIs to complement setWebViewClient() and setWebChromeClient()
New ProxyController API that allows setting a network request proxy for an app’s WebViews. See ProxyController
New WebViewAssetLoader API to simplify loading APK assets, resources, and files from the app data directory via request interception. This allows access to the web and local resources without disabling CORS (load resources from different sources). See WebViewAssetLoader
New TracingController API to collect WebView tracing information for debugging purposes. See TracingController
New RenderProcess APIs to manage WebView renderer services, and to detect when poorly behaved content causes WebView renderers to become unresponsive. See WebViewRenderProcessClient
Existing APIs were updated to include nullability and thread annotations

New alphas

SQLite 2.1.0-alpha01

The first preview of the next major release:

Added a new property to SupportSQLiteOpenHelper.Configuration called useNoBackupDirectory to indicate that a file-based database should be created and located from the no backup directory.

One more step to the stable release

Many libraries from AndroidX receive bugfix updates or simply update of dependencies:

If you now Russian and want to know more about Android development you can subscribe to Android Broadcast Telegram Channel