A: As an Android developer, I use many Google tools every day like Jetpack Compose and other Android libraries, Android Studio, and Material Design. I also like to explore some of the other Google tools in personal projects. I’ve built a Flutter app, poked around in Firebase, and trained my own ML model using the model maker.

A: It’s hard to choose one but I’m really excited about Jetpack Compose! It’s really exciting to be able to work with a new and evolving framework with so much energy and input coming from the developer community. Compose makes it easier to quickly build things that previously could be quite complex like animations and custom layouts. It also has some very cool tooling in Android Studio like Live Edit and recomposition counts; all of which improve developer efficiency and app quality. One of my favorite things about Compose in general is that I think it will make Android development more accessible to more people because it is more intuitive and easier to get started and so we’ll see the Android community continue to grow with new perspectives and backgrounds bringing in new ideas.

Google also provides a lot of really helpful tools for building more accessible mobile apps and I’m really glad these important tools also exist! The Accessibility Scanner is available on Google Play and can identify some common accessibility pitfalls in your app with tips about how to fix them and why it’s important. The “Accessibility in Jetpack Compose” code lab is a great starting place for learning more about these concepts.

A: A favorite personal project is a (very) simple flower identifying app built using ML Kit ’s Image Labeling API and Android. After the 2020 ML-focused Android Developer Challenge, I was very curious about ML Kit but also still quite intimidated by the idea of machine learning. It was surprisingly easy to follow the documentation to build and tinker with a custom model and then add it to an Android app. I just recently migrated the app to Jetpack Compose.

A: Find a community! Like most things, developing is more fun with friends.