Today at Google I/O 2023, Google’s developer conference, several updates to Google products and services were announced in order to offer developers improved experiences.
Among these announcements was the launch of the Watch Face Format. This offers developers a new way to build watch faces for Wear OS smartwatches with a declarative XML format to design the appearance and behavior of watch faces.
According to Google, this means there is no need for the executable code involved in building a watch face, and there is also no code embedded in the watch face APK. With this release, users can create analogue and digital watch faces, watch faces with complications, customizable watch faces, and more.
Updates have also been made to Jetpack Compose, including the ability to bring Compose everywhere that the developer is building UI, whether that be on a phone, tablet, foldable device, watch, or TV. These changes are available in the May 2023 release and the most recent alpha versions of the Compose libraries.
Furthermore, the performance of Compose has been improved. The company stated that since October, modifiers have started to migrate to an improved system, and with this, text has seen a 22% performance gain that can be seen in the latest alpha release.
The alpha version of the UI framework for creating functional apps for Android TV Compose for TV has also been released. With this, apps can be built with less code, easier maintenance, and a modern Material 3 look.
Next, Android Studio Hedgehog was launched in order to offer developers an AI powered conversational experience geared at heightened productivity. This offers improved tools when developing for multiple form factors, and helps to improve the quality of applications with new insights, debugging, and testing solutions.
Android for Cars also received updates intended to expand the reach developers have with users in the car.
Among these updates is the global rollout of Waze on the Google Play Store for all cars with Google built-in. Additional templates were also created for Android for Cars App Library in order to accelerate development time across several app categories, such as navigation.
This update also brings tools to port media apps across Android for Cars; new app categories for driving experiences; and video, gaming, and browsing in cars.
Additionally, Google Play has been updated so that on top of the ability to tailor by country and pre-registration status, users can now customize listings for inactive users, so they have the chance to try out an app or game again.
Google also announced that custom store listing groups for Google Ads App campaign ad groups are set to be launched in the near future. This will allow for custom listings to be served to users coming from specific ads on AdMob and YouTube.
Next, Google Workspace adds Duet AI, combining all of Workspace’s generative AI features and allowing users to collaborate with AI so they can enhance their productivity. Duet AI is also coming to Google Cloud, enabling users to solve common work challenges with the AI collaborator.
There have also been several updates to Vertex AI, including three new foundation models that can be accessed through API, tuned through an AI in Generative AI Studio, or deployed to a data science notebook.
Lastly, Google Cloud has launched the next-generation A3 GPU supercomputer. With this, Google Cloud offers users a complete range of GPU for the training and inference of machine learning models.
For more information on these releases, visit the website.