Android Jetpack Weekly #3

Review of the most interesting updates in Android Jetpack libraries

This week (August 5–11 2019) was very rich for updates in Android Jetpack

Activity

Changes in 1.1.0-alpha02 (compare to 1.1.0-alpha01):

• SavedStateViewModelFactory is now the default factory used when using with a ComponentActivity

Ads

The Advertising ID library defines an interface to interact with system-level ad providers across the devices running your app. This interface allows your app to receive consistent advertising ID values.

The library supports Android 4.0+ (API Level 14+)

Guidance for the library

Browser

Changes in 1.2.0-alpha07 (compare to 1.2.0-alpha06)

• Dark Theme support: provide theme colors to be used when the device is in dark mode
• Dark Theme support: override whether the launched browser should be in dark or light mode
• Trusted Web Activities: the TrustedWebActivityBuilder can be used to easily create and launch Trusted Web Activities.
• The TrustedWebActivityService and related classes can be used to communicate with the provider - accepting web push notifications for the linked website and displaying them from the client app. This part of the API is liable to change.
• Custom Tabs sessions can now be created with ids, allowing the merging of two sessions launched by the same application with the same id.

CameraX

Change in 1.0.0-alpha04 (compare to 1.0.0-alpha4)

• Changes to Aspect Ratio and Resolution selection: CameraX’s goal is to successfully initialize a camera session. This means CameraX will compromise on resolution/aspect ratios based on device capability.
• A preview use case is now considered to have a default 4:3 aspect ratio
• When CameraX internally considers changes to requested resolutions and aspect ratios based on device capability, it will first try to maintain the same aspect ratio
• A “Nearest mod16” version of the resolution is considered as the same aspect ratio
• The behavior of ImageReaderMode.ACQUIRE_LATEST_IMAGE is now non-blocking
• Bug fixes

New libraries were released:

• CameraX Extensions 1.0.0-alpha01 was introduced for accessing effects on supported devices
• CameraX View 1.0.0-alpha01 was released. The library contains new Camera View class

AndroidX Core

Changes in 1.2.0-alpha03 (compare to 1.2.0-alpha02)

• Added UriCompat.toSafeString(Uri) to provide URI escaping that is updatable separately from the platform
• Added Predicate<T> interface to provide Java 8-style predicates without requiring Java 8 language features
• Added async, counter, and isEnabled to TraceCompat
• Bug fixes

Fragment

Changes in 1.2.0-alpha02 (compare to 1.1.0-alpha01)

• SavedStateViewModelFactory is now the default factory with a Fragment.
• The default animations when using TRANSIT_FRAGMENT_OPEN, TRANSIT_FRAGMENT_CLOSE, TRANSIT_FRAGMENT_FADE with setTransition on a FragmentTransaction have been updated to match the animations used by activities on Android Q devices
• FragmentContainerView as a new container for dynamically added Fragments, instead of FrameLayout.
• Added FragmentManager.findFragment(View) to retrieve the containing Fragment from a view inflated by a fragment
• Added FragmentTransaction.add() and FragmentTranscation.replace() that take containerViewId, a Class of Fragment, optional Bundle of arguments and Fragment’s tag. These methods use new FragmentFactory to instantiate Fragment
• The breadcrumb title related APIs on FragmentTransaction and FragmentManager.BackStackEntry have been deprecated
• FragmentTransaction.setTransitionStyle() has been deprecated
• Bug fixes

Changes in 1.1.0-rc04 (compare to 1.1.0-rc03)

• Bug fixes only

Lifecycle

Changes in 2.2.0-alpha03 (compare to 2.2.0-alpha02)

• Implementations of ViewModelStoreOwner can now optionally implement HasDefaultViewModelProviderFactory to provide a default ViewModelProvider.Factory
• ViewModelProviders.of() is deprecated. Now you need to use ViewModelProvider constructor.

Lifecycle ViewModel SavedState

Changes in 1.0.0-alpha03 (compare to 1.1.0-alpha02)

• The library no longer depends on fragment

RecyclerView

Changes in 1.1.0-beta02 (compare to 1.1.0-beta01)

• RecyclerView now has a default style attribute recyclerViewStyle, which allows setting of the default style in your theme

Room

Changes in 2.2.0-alpha02 (compare to 2.2.0-alpha01)

• Kotlin Coroutine Flow support: @Query DAO methods can now return type Flow<T>. The returned Flow will re-emit a new set of values if the observing tables in the query are invalidated.
• Expanding Projections: A new experimental compiler option room.expandProjection was added that causes Room to rewrite a query with a star projection to only contain the columns in the returning type POJO.
• Callback RoomDatabase.Callback.onDestructiveMigration() was added when Room destructively migrates a database
• Bug fixes

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