Google I/O 2024: What Android Developers need to know
Google is doing catch-up with OpenAI this year and I/O 2024 is all about bringing AI to your apps and developer environment.
Let’s explore everything you need to know as an Android Developer.
Bring AI to your mobile apps
Google is pushing for Gemini Nano, their AI technology running on device, now available for both Android and Chrome.
Gemini Nano will be available later this year on Pixel devices but you can already start building with it today. It allows you to take advantage of offline AI functionalities without paying for cloud services and do things such as:
- Image Understanding: Get descriptions of what’s in an image
- Speech Transcription: Bring voice to your apps without network latency
- Text Summarization: Distil text into a clear summary without ChatGPT
On top of Gemini Nano, Google is releasing Firebase Genkit to easily integrate all of Google’s AI models into your app. It allows you to generate content, use semantic search, orchestrate tools, and build an entire app without having to create your own backend or even API.
Solo Mobile Developers building their apps today should be able to take advantage of it to bring AI to their apps faster.
Develop faster with Generative AI
On top of on device and cloud AI, Google is also pushing hard for AI powered development by opening up their new web IDE IDX and bringing generative AI to Android Studio (IntelliJ).
IDX is pretty much a VSCode fork with Google’s take on Copilot. It allows you to create apps with Google’s technologies faster by leveraging templates and AI, and access your IDE in the cloud.
While probably too early to replace Android Studio and VSCode for most, it’s available this week to everyone.
In typical Google fashion, the company is still investing in different IDEs at the same time. In the next Android Studio release, you’ll be able to start using Gemini in your IDE to generate code based on images.
This should allow you to quickly turn Figma designs or Wireframes into code so you can focus on writing the business logic.
Android 15
This year, the new Android version is taking a backseat in favor of AI. While you shouldn’t expect new flagship functionalities for the mobile OS, Google is once again pushing more OS restrictions for performance and privacy, as well as breaking API changes
You can follow all the behavior changes here and start supporting them in your app before the OS release sometime this summer.
