
Android Developers Backstage
Android Backstage, a podcast by and for Android developers. Hosted by developers from the Android engineering team, this show covers topics of interest to Android programmers, with in-depth discussions and interviews with engineers on the Android team at Google.
Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs
Latest episodes

Mar 22, 2023 • 49min
Episode 196: Android Studio, behind the scenes
Raluca Sauciuc joins Tor and Romain to talk about what goes on behind the scenes in Android Studio. Raluca takes us through the tools and workflows used by the Android Studio team to improve performance and memory usage, and avoid future regressions. She also explains how the team adopts new versions of the IntelliJ IDE and platform, and how they can deal with massive code merges. Raluca, Romain, and Tor Romain: @romainguy and romainguy@androiddev.social Tor: @tornorbye and tornorbye@androiddev.social Chet: @chethaase and chethaase@androiddev.social Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

Feb 15, 2023 • 45min
Episode 195: Mainlining
Chet and Romain talk to Jeff Hamilton and Anton Hansson from the Mainline team about "modular system components", and the new SDK extension framework which lets developers access them. Anton Hansson top right, and Jeff Hamilton bottom left, with Romain and Chet Blog post: https://goo.gle/3S1c3g4 AndroidX convenience constants, e.g. T_EXTENSION_INT: https://goo.gle/3lEJwRx Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

Jan 17, 2023 • 53min
Episode 194: Subtext
This time, Tor, Romain, and Chet were joined by Siyamed Sinir and Sean McQuillan from the Android Text team to talk about, well, text. Which, it turns out, is a very deep, complicated, and constantly evolving technology. The conversation covered everything from the fundamentals of the text stack on Android to the capabilities and implementation of text in Jetpack Compose to internationalization to fonts to emojis to performance to.... you get the idea. There was a lot of stuff to talk about. And so much subtext. Romain, Chet, Sean, Tor, and Siyamed (using RTL support: Siyamed, Tor, Sean, Chet, and Romain) Links: Text In Compose Compose Variable Fonts ComboBreaker ColrV1 Fonts i18n & Text in Android 13 Text is hard! Rendering & Editing Compose Downloadable Fonts Romain: @romainguy and romainguy@androiddev.social Tor: @tornorbye and tornorbye@androiddev.social Chet: @chethaase and chethaase@androiddev.social Siyamed:@siyamed Sean: tech.lgbt/@objcode Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

Dec 22, 2022 • 46min
Episode 193: Kotlin
In this episode, James Ward joins Chet, Tor, and Romain to talk about Kotlin. We talked about Kotlin Multiplatform (both KMP and KMM) and what’s coming for Kotlin in 2023, especially the new K2 frontend. James, Tor, Romain, and Chet. Links: Kotlin Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) Jetpack Multiplatform Libraries Compose Multiplatform by JetBrains Romain: @romainguy and romainguy@androiddev.social Tor: @tornorbye and tornorbye@androiddev.social Chet: @chethaase and chethaase@androiddev.social James: @_jamesward Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

Nov 21, 2022 • 58min
Episode 192: The Path Forward
This time, Romain and Chet ditched Tor so that they could geek out about graphics, talking about paths, Bézier curves, morphing, and more. Romain and Chet alone in the recording Studio. Links: V9: Vector 9-patches Pathway: Path data querying Android Path Shape Shifter Bézier Primer The Beauty of Bézier Curves Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy

5 snips
Nov 11, 2022 • 52min
Episode 191: Compose Lazy Layouts
We recorded episode 191 from the studio in the London office, where Rebecca Franks from the developer relations team joined Chet as a guest host. We talked with Andrei Shikov, Matvei Malkov, and Andrey Kulikov from the Jetpack Compose engineering team about layouts, especially the lazy ones, which are the Compose equivalent of RecyclerView. Rebecca, Chet, Andrei, Andrey, and Matvei, in the London recording studio. Links: Layouts in Compose Compose Custom layouts ADB 167: Jetpack Compose Layout Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye Rebecca Franks: @riggaroo Andrei Shikov: @shikasd_ Matvei Malkov: @matvei_jj Andrey Kulikov: @and_kulikov

5 snips
Nov 4, 2022 • 53min
Episode 190: Performance Review
In this episode, Tor and Chet learn some more about performance from Carmen. Carmen works on the Android Platform Performance team and is an expert on everything related to performance. This is the perfect episode for you if you ever wanted to learn more about R8, perfetto, baseline profiles, custom performance tracing, power metrics, etc. Tor, Carmen, and Chet Links: Perfetto Android’s guide to app performance Baseline profiles Benchmarking with Microbenchmark and Macrobenchmark Jetpack Tracing library Jetpack JankStats library Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

Sep 22, 2022 • 50min
Episode 189: Video Conference
In this episode (the first in-studio-with-guests recording since early 2020!), Tor and Chet spoke with Marc Bächinger, Toni Heidenreich, and Andrew Lewis from the Android Media team, where they work on video technologies and APIs like ExoPlayer. We talked about the evolution of ExoPlayer and platform media capabilities as well as ongoing and near-future features. Back: Chet and Tor, Front: Mark, Toni, and Andrew Links: Introduction to Media3 ExoPlayer on GitHub Guide for migrating to Media3 Jetpack Media3 on GitHub Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye

Sep 1, 2022 • 52min
Episode 188: Android 13
It’s our first episode back in the studio, and in a new, shiny studio too! In this episode, we talk about some of our favorite new features and changes of the new version of Android, both for users and developers. More importantly, the audio quality of this episode is much better thanks to the amazing work from the media production teams at Google. Tor, Romain, and Chet happy to be back in a studio with proper audio equipment Links Android 13 for developers API diff Chet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs

Jul 25, 2022 • 44min
Episode 187: System UI: A Retrospective
“Our job isn’t to remove complexity, but to manage it”- Glen Murphy (as remembered by Dan) In this episode, we talk with Dan Sandler and Adam Cohen from the SystemUI team. We dip into a bit of history, talking about where things were at when they joined the team (2009-10), and how things have developed in the many years since, including how these projects and teams scaled from a single person working on it part-time to now having much larger teams doing many more things. Which kind of describes software development in general. We also talk about how to expose (or not) gestures and features in a UI system. Related: there are some bonus pro-tips on using some hidden features of System UI, as a prize for careful listeners and podcast hosts. Top: Tor & Adam, Bottom: Dan, Dan’s book cover illustration, & Chet Links: xkcd: Workflow Dan: @dsandler Adam: adam-cohenChet: @chethaase Romain: @romainguy Tor: @tornorbye Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs